PageRank dropped to 0 - because of duplicate content?

[AcademyArt]

A few of my pages recently dropped to a PR 0 when they were previously a PR 5. I think the main source of this issue is that we had a www.widgets.com/xyz/index.html version and a www.widgets.com/xyz/ version.

We have since 301 redirected the www.widgets.com/xyz/ to www.widgets.com/xyz/index.html. The only issue now is trying to get our PR for our index.html pages back. Has anyone came across this issue in the past? If so, what did you do to get your PR back?

Thanks ahead of time.

[mhansen]

Just my own opin here... but I doubt that the canonicalization alone would have that kind of effect on your a PR5 page. PR5 is a pretty stout ranking that generally takes a good bit of inbound authority linking to reach.

My guess is that its a toolbar anomaly, or that something more has occurred, like the content changed (Added outbound links maybe?) on the page itself.

Have you had a drop in traffic to the page as well? Which version is cached? Have you used WMT to remove the duplicate? etc...

Its just odd to have that stout of a page dropped to a zero.

MH

[tedster]

That kind of drop in toolbar PR is usually one of two things - and anomaly/bug, or a sign that Google thinks you're selling links.

[steveb]

When talking about "a few" pages, it can often be the pages go into the supplemental index. When that happens they get a PR0.

In your case it seems obvious the PR zeroes are because of duplicate content, either because the index.html page had no PR before but the /xyz/ one did, or strictly because the duplicate content caused one or both of the /xyz/ and index.html pages to be supplemental.

On the other hand, you are doing your redirecting illogically backwards. Why would you ever redirect /xyz/ to /xyz/index.html ?

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Did both www.widgets.com/xyz/index.html and www.widgets.com/xyz/ had PR 5 earlier or they had different PR's before you did the 301 redirect?

[piatkow]

Has this actually affected your traffic? People get hung up on PR when this is only one factor in the SERPS and often not the deciding one.

[dazzlindonna]

piatkow, it's true that one shouldn't get hung up about PR, but it's also true that such a big change probably signals "something" (unless it's just a glitch) and there's every reason, imo, to be concerned. Any time Google sends a message by dropping PR, I would want to understand what the message is, because I may need to fix something.

[Arizal]

Google shows PR for specific pages. So it depends on when you made the changes. Last PR update for the toolbar was in April, the next one is yet to come.

If you redirected www.widgets.com/xyz/ to www.widgets.com/xyz/index.html after the last PR-update in April it is just normal that the /index.html pages whill show you a 0/white bar.

I do such redirects quite often for sites I work with and it is always the same. You have to wait for the next PR update to get the green bar back :)

Might be a 4 instead of a 5, though, as 301 does not preserve 100% of the link juice. Depends on how strong the PR "5" actually was.

Only if you made the redirect a considerable time before April (lets say End of February) you hae a need to be concerned about the white line in the toolbar.