Is this a penalty or glitch: gone from page rank 4 to 0

[kellyman]

I need a little advice

My site yesterday dropped from a page rank 4 to page rank 0, i dont really want to post the link but i will give a little background

My site is 2 years old car sales site, i paid a Seo company to work the site which they got me to page 1 for some very competative keywords, the link profile was quite bad with poor quality so i stopped using them, this was around 9 months ago, in the mean time i have added only relavant links and a lot of content.

October 2010 my site dropped for the main keywords which were page 1 now page 4, but i still have many keywords on page 1 of Google so if i had a penalty of some kind it was not severe.

In the last 2 months i have removed some pageways that could have deemd to violate Googles terms and conditions pages made up targeting my local areas, i also had an issue where my server was duplicating URL's from say /mysite/audi-car-leasing to mysite/Audi-Car-Leasing (capitolising the first letter)

This was fixed dont know how that happened but i noticed it in web master tools and set the server to produce all lower case URL's the 301 the uppercases to the lower.

other than that i dont know why this has happened, i would have thought if Google dropped my site because of a guidline violation they would have dropped me like they did and also removed the PR then not wait 2 months then see all the work i have done the slap me with that

I am really lost of what to do, i hope i have given you enough information to offer an suggestion.

[linkbuildr]

Sounds like a penalty to me, especially if they over built certain anchor text links.

They on lousy unrelated blogs, blog commenting and junk article sites?

[tedster]

The PageRank drop sounds like just a visible tool bar thing, because you are redirecting to new URLs. That should not be a concern. The ranking drops are more the issue. Yes, that may be a penalty.

However, there were also some algorithm changes in October that took away some power from low quality backlinks. So, you may not be truly penalized, but only ranking poorly. In other words that poor quality backlink profile is just not working the way it did.

Are you getting any page 1 rankings?

[jimbeetle]

Toolbar PR is really not much of a useful indicator of anything for analysis; it's often buggy, twitchy, out of date. And the way SERPs bounce around for different people, locations, intent, time of day (and phases of the moon), using changes in postion has also become problematic.

Bottom line: What changes to site traffic have you seen, if any?

October 2010

There was a twist of the knobs around Oct 21-22 that affected a lot of sites. The handful I was able to look at had kind of iffy backlink profiles, among them a lot of article marketing. What's your site's backlink profile like?

Guess tedster types a heck of a lot faster than I do

[kellyman]

Many thanks for the replys, I really do appreciate your time

My site first dropped on the 1st October and to be honest this could have been when my site started reproducing the duplicate URL's i am not 100% sure, but dont mind putting the drop down to that as it did turn out to be a big issue with nearly 3060 duplicated titles and such showing in WMT which was totally my fault and for the life of me do not know how this happened but it did and now thats fixed, that was when i fixed the server producing them and then 301 redirected those to the lower case, WMT is still showing 200 duplicates but this was fixed 2 weeks ago and to see only that many now is a massive improvement and im sure in another week they will be down to zero

I am not fussed what PR my site is but to see it go from a 4 to a 0 worried the hell out of me and normally when you hear that people think penalty

i have gone over the site with a fine tooth comb to put it back into a good place, added lots of quality pages and removed anything that could have looked like a door way page

My backlink profile is a little spammy due to a campaign i got a company to do for me but that was 9 months ago but i do not have 1 single outbound link, so cannot really see how i would get penalised for spammy links , i would have thought Google was a bit better than that they would just discount those links otherwise i would go out and spam the hell out of my competitors and get them penalised.

Tedster, even though my homepage has stayed the same and only my deep links have been 301 will this still affect the home page?

Although my site lost around 75% of its traffic from October 1st is very slowly climbing, i can see improvements when i look in WMT and see the duplicate pages being reduced, but im bracing myself for another hit, to which i cannot afford

I have quite a few page 1 rankings for some low keywords even number 1 position for eco car leasing (thats a hint to the site if you want to take a look) but my main big keywords took a 28 position dive in October and now sit on page 4

Im based in the UK if this helps

I really hope its a glitch as i can put the blame for the first drop on me but i honestly believe i have done everything within my power to keep the site within Googles guidlines,

[tedster]

Links on internal pages circulate ranking power, too. And they probably all link back to the HomePage, so yes, internal problems can sometimes affect home page ranking.