Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Recently we have added a large number of quality authors to our site and increased the rate of daily content we added. We also made changes to our front pages and added more relevant content to internal pages too. Can this be an issue with Google? However if this is an issue, how can we ever hope to redesign large sites?
We have over 200K pages, not sure about the exact count so could be more.
All of these we expected to lead to more popularity of the site and naturally a better ranking.
Google responded positively to the changes in terms to traffic but suddenly reduced the page ranking from 6 to 5.
We recently unblocked (from robots.txt) the tag pages in our site as I heard from many sources in webmasterworld and I think from Matt Cutts too (in his blog) that they are proper content and shouldn't affect negatively to make them available for crawl.
The only other change is that we added a plugin which adds the page title to meta description and tags as meta keywords too.
I am perplexed by Google's reduction in page ranking when I was expecting it to go up simply because more people now naturally link to our content from various blogs and popular magazines etc.
We never did reciprocal linking, never purchased any link, in short never done any colored hat seo stuff.
We were always focused on adding quality content and on a regular basis.
What do you think are the potential causes to it?
Should I need to worry as traffic seems unaffected as of now?
Should I submit for reconsideration as I am 100% positive I have done nothing wrong.
As the size of the web grows, the PR scale sort of stretches around, and what once had a PR6 can easily slip to a PR5 even if it is truly now a stronger page. It's all part of the fact that PR is not a linear scale but more like an exponential scale.
You are correctly focusing on traffic at any rate - who needs those green pixels, anyway?
By the time you see a PR change on the toolbar (which has only a very coarse scale of 11 values) it has already been reflected in your actual rankings for weeks of months. On the back end, Google calculates PR to many decinial places - and they recalculate it continually.
Even in that period I haven't done any changes other than those described above.
Assuming the worst that it is some kind of penalty, any idea what can go wrong with only the changes I described above.
PR going down is also not necessarily "damage" at all. I'd suggest reading more about PR in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page - and through Site Search [webmasterworld.com]. Knowledge and the experience of others should help to put your mind at ease.
You are correctly focusing on traffic at any rate - who needs those green pixels, anyway?
I couldn't agree more. There are still fragments of "PR obsession" floating around - I guess, not too long ago, it was arguably a lot more important than it is now. I see PR6 sites with 250,000+ alexa rankings and PR3 sites with < 150,000 alexa rankings all the time.
At the end of the day it's all about "feet" visiting your website. Traffic is directly tied to revenue and only somewhat correlated with PR.
We never did reciprocal linking, never purchased any link, in short never done any colored hat seo stuff.
We were always focused on adding quality content and on a regular basis.
This is a moral approach in such a competitive world. I'm sure you could benefit massively from just a little conventional link building. The 80/20 rule would tell you to spend 20% of the time it would take to do full blown link building to attain 80% of the result.
To back up the conclusion above, i.e. that the moral approach is, unfortunately, not always as effective, I attach a very interesting article I read the other day:
[webmasterworld.com...]
