Sudden drop in page rank?

[Amps]

One of our sites has had a 2 point drop in page rank at some point, roughly, in the last two months. (last time i checked it was at the start of the year)

The only changing factors i can think of, from our end, is a dupe of some of our content, a handful of articles, to one of our newer sites. And thats about it.

Our site is quite graphically heavy, and i was wondering if google has implemented any checks on site speed, i know this has been talked about for some time now?

Thanks all.

[rainborick]

From what I've seen, the cause of 1-2 point drops in PageRank scores is most often due to Google's periodic recalibration of the Toolbar PageRank display which is done to acommodate the growth of the web. This does not generally have any impact on rankings. Naturally, its also possible that your site lost one or more links since you noticed the change. It's nothing to do with site speed, certainly. While I don't recommend ignoring the Toolbar PageRank score, the best course is always to focus on your rankings first. If they're steady, then you have no worries. If not, then you need to look at possible causes.

[tedster]

I'd go even further and direct your attention to search traffic itself, rather than rankings. You'll probably never check the rankings for all the search terms that bring you traffic anyway. And even if you did, the actual positions can vary significantly for different users around the globe.

Rainborick is correct. PageRank is a measure of how your site is linked from other sites. It does not measure content or keywords in any way.

Here's one way to think about what PageRank is trying to measure for any page. It's the idea of a "random walk" around the web. Imagine beginning on any old page, let's call it page-A. Then click on a link from page-A at random, then load the new page. Now click on a random link on that new page --- etc, etc.

PageRank aims to measure the probability that a "random walk" like this will end up on page-A. Mathematically, a probability is a number somewhere between 0 and 1 -- so we might think of PageRank as being the actual probability, but multiplied by 10.

So PageRank is all about connectedness, all about links - not content. And PageRank is only one of the factors that Google uses to decide where to rank a page for any particular search query.

[Amps]

Cheers guys! Much appreciated.