Links, content increased, Pagerank down?!

Lost positions when I should have gone up

[truemat]

Anyone shed any light on this.

4 year old site, lots of content continually increasing, plenty of relevant links, amount of links increased weekly.

New Pagerank is down from what it was and so is my positioning for my keywords.

Bizarre and very frustrating.

[DerekH]

If you use Google's "InURL:www.yoursite.com", you should be able to find out whether Google has actually indexed all your pages.

If not, there may be a problem with broken links or other navigation issues. Have you moved any pages to a different URL address over this time - I move my pages around from time to time, when one area, for example, has grown to be unmanageable and needs new addresses for me to be able to sift and sort the pages (yes I know that many advocate never changing a URL, but with the best will in the world, I've never been able to define a structure that flexibly and accurately!

Many on this forum, and GoogleGuy too, advocate the use of a Site Map which is readily accessible from high up the site and which gives simple hard links to all the pages. It's an easy way to get reindexed if you move pages.

Page Rank is a measure related to the number of links to a page, and it may well be, as happens to me, that a good link in to my site suddenly vanishes when the donor closes down his site.

Of course, I may be teaching you to suck eggs, but since no-one else has responded to your call for help, I thought I'd chip away at the more obvious areas to try first!
DerekH

[tigger]

you could also make sure you've not lost any links or any of the sites you are linking to have not been banned or picked up a penalty

[truemat]

I've got a sitemap.

It looks like Google hasn't picked up all the links to my site from other sites. From what I've read here that is nothing new.

Would linking to a site which has a penalty or which is banned lessen my rank (pr). I'm checkin' 'em now anyway
:-)).

Thanks for the info guys, I don't think I'll ever be sucking eggs with the kind info that can be found here!

Always something new.

Truemat

[Gus_R]

truemat: Check high pr sites linking to you, possibly one of them decreased.

[kiril]

I have a question to follow up on one of DerekH's points about broken links:

Are broken links considered cause for a penalty?

I'm concerned about this, because I have produced some broken links recently. This happened partly because of a redesign but also because of pages with dated material that are pretty worthless after the date passes, and so I get rid of them.

The pages in question were not likely to end up in people's bookmarks or on lists of links, so from that viewpoint, I'm probably not causing aggravation for web surfers. On the other hand, google did spider them and they ended up in the SERPS (and haven't completely disappeared yet).