Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a blog that talks was started 6 months ago and has grown fairly well with a few hundred visitors a week finding it. It also started showing up on the first few pages of Google for some pretty decent keywords and all was looking good.
This week though the PR bar no longer shows a 3, but a big slab of grey. The blog has also fallen down in the rankings.
What is strange though is the penalty only seems to apply to the blog homepage. It is set up as www.example.com/blog. The pages on example.com still have pagerank, and some of the individual blog posts now show above the blog homepage in search results.
I have two questions:
1. Any ideas what this could be? Can a penalty only apply to one page?
2. What are the known causes of penalties?
- duplicate content? (we don't have any)
- paid for links? (we don't have any)
- what else?
[edited by: tedster at 8:31 pm (utc) on July 25, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]
A switch to showing graybar PR is not necessarily a penalty, however. In fact, some of the graybar PR seems impossible to understand right now - there may even be some bugs involved.
The key would be seeing HOW MUCH your rankings for that page are affected. There was recently a very big shake-up in the search results (dare we call it an "update"?) and if you rankings dopeed just a few positions, that is probably not a penalty. If your rankings fell many PAGES, then that is most likely a penalty. The five page boot-kick seems to be getting handed out a lot this past month.
So do you have a big ranking drop? Or just a small one? And since there is no such thing as "a" ranking these days, thanks to geo-location and other kinds of customization, it would be good to check your traffic from Google, and see how that is affected. You can even see an apparent ranking drop with improved traffic!
Strangely, though rankings for the main keywords have fallen, overall traffic is slightly higher thanks to the longtail results.
Even more strangely, a wuick look at the blog just now shows we are back up to a PR3!
Damn you Google and the levels of stress you put us under.
