Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Now why would Google bring me down to zero. Is there any way to tell why exactly this happens... and is it ever a temporary thing, like for a day or two; or am I basically screwed?
[edited by: tedster at 8:56 pm (utc) on Jan. 17, 2009]
As you can see around this forum, the so called "gray bar disease" is becoming quite widespread, removing PR information from the public toolbar display for many reasons. Sometimes Google seems displeased with the way backlinks are acquired - such as links forced by wordpress "sponsored templates" or other widgets that require a backlink. Sometimes the pages that went graybar appear to be link collections with little value to users.
The most important question is whether your traffic and ranking are affected. In many cases, they are not.
I did add some external links during this time, some were reciprocal... I wonder if this flagged my account for some reason. I have a good amount of new organic links coming in almost everyday due to the nature of my offerings.
I really don't want all this to go to waste if it is useless at this point. This just happened today, but still I am not one to like to sit on my hands and just hope things get better if you know what I mean. Does it go away often for most people, or are the majority SOL ?
My rule of thumb is No link exchange because even a decent website owner that you can trust can be part of a bad neighbhorhoood without his/her even knowing it (website hacks, forum links, etc.).
My home page had PR of 1 and the four other main pages had PR of 4 and 5. 6 months later the home page had PR of 4 and the rest went grey! Traffic still remained the same.
seriously... it could be temporary troubles Google are having crawling your site. Give a bit of time before any drastic action
Give a bit of time before any drastic action
You should never take "drastic action" after any length of time purely on the basis of what a toolbar tells you.
As Tedster mentions above, the only real conditions to consider are traffic and rankings.
If both of those are good, but the toolbar is bugging you, the best action to take is to uninstall the toolbar.
You should never take "drastic action" after any length of time purely on the basis of what a toolbar tells you.
I believe your advice is wrong. If Google is having troubles crawling your site then action is needed. I highly doubt you would sit there and watch your income disappear, when you could save it by changing something e.g. htaccess file.
You also need to take into account that google page rank is important. People are willing to pay money for high pay rank regardless of whether it is beneficial to SERPS. If you had a page rank 8 website then I am sure you could make a lot of money from the pure basis that it is a page rank 8 site. Different webmasters have different methods and motives, not everyone has SERPS as a top priority.
and what is worse all my SERPs have tanked... I know this is just another one of Google's 'tweeks' and hope they sort it out soonest. All the other sites that I am usually competing against and winning for my little keyword are still holding their positons. Only my site has tanked. anyways it has done this on and off for the last 5 years and it always comes back within a week or two. So just have to wait...
If Google is having troubles crawling your site then action is needed
I agree, but the toolbar has nothing to do with G's crawlers.
I highly doubt you would sit there and watch your income disappear, when you could save it by changing something e.g. htaccess file.
Yes, I agree, but again this isn't related to the toolbar.
The toolbar is frequently broken. If it's bugging you, I recommend uninstalling it - watch revenue, traffic and SERPS - those are the important metrics.
The OP's post is about traffic and product sales, not selling links.
I agree, but the toolbar has nothing to do with G's crawlers.
It does, if your page can't be crawled then you lose Page Rank. My site was temporarily down to Page Rank 0 whilst google couldn't crawl it.
if your page can't be crawled then you lose Page Rank
That's an interesting side effect, and noted, thanks. However the toolbar doesn't update frequently enough for that to really be a decent detection mechanism of a serious problem like that.
I would suggest using other methods for detecting crawling problems than the toolbar.
Google seems to be showing some activty as I have seen many posts on other webmaster forums reporting similar problems.
We're pushing PageRank canonicalization updates (as opposed to PageRank values) much more regularly these days, so my first response in a situation like this is to say "Don't Panic," especially if your site hasn't been selling any links that pass PageRank. Normally new canonicalization maps are pushed a few days later and that will often resolve things.For example, a large retail website had a PageRank go from 7 to 0 recently, but it was because of a deep url/canonicalization issue with their home page. Within a few days, the system had selected the canonical url that most folks would expect and the PageRank came back without anything done by a Googler.
[seroundtable.com...]
Hmmm.... PR canonicalization updates following on the heels of a toolbar update. That does clarify a few things we've noticed over the past few PR updates.
