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My page rank was 5 and I was listed highly for all my major search terms. Then my page rank went from 5 to 4 and my listings dropped considerably with it. At the same time my backwards links reduced from around 140 to 70(some of these I think were because my inner links were then reduced to below 4 but also my DMOZ link and a few others went, its still there)
I thought that some of this may because I had signed some guest books with links but they are still showing.
The final thing I thought it may be is that because I am UK based and most of my traffic is US based I set up an affiliate site which I linked to saying US customers click here. I also set up my own domain name for the affiliate site as the one it assigned could not be remembered by the customer. I then put links to my site from the second site for the backward link. Both sites therefore sold similar products and were from the same host / ip.
Looking at www3.google I've not even got the ranking I've got now.
I know i've thrown alot in here but any advice would be great.
Dropping pagerank doesn't mean you have been penalized. It happens all the time to web sites that don't have strong stable links.
Everytime an update happens, there are usually more pages added to the database, and everybody's PR is recalculated. Pages that disappear are accounted for, and the PR is subsequently reduced to those pages that formerly received PR from the now missing pages, and the process is repeated down the line.
If you haven't done anything wrong then don't worry about it.
If you are unsure about what practices are incorrect, then visit google and click around their web site- look for the webmaster faq.
I'd give you the link but it's probably good exercise for you if you do the legwork.
Happy webmastering!
:) Y
Your seperate affiliate site is fine but I would try and get some new links going directly to it from other sites, so it can stand on its own. Don't worry about www3 at the moment, everything is on its head and it will all change!
I'm intrigued how you know your visitors are U.S.? Your stats may show .com visitors but these may be people using an isp such as ntl.com, which are in fact UK people. For instance, on my stats I see:
.com US Commercial 7860 30.19%
.uk United Kingdom 5187 19.92%
but we have probably 80% UK visitors. The 30.19% just means it was a .com domain that visited, not necessarily a visitor living in the USA, as .com is a worldwide domain ending.
