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Thought I'd take a look at how things are panning out after this latest PR update and I am quite excited really, we've just been blessed with our first PR0, so I guess now we have some first hand material to try and understand what is going on!
There seems to be something a little strange here though, a few different things seem to be getting put together to complete a larger jigsaw.
Lets start at the beginning...we had a site, quite large with about 40000 pages indexed in google doing very nicely. At the end of Jan google traffic was falling a little bit so we looked at ways to enhance the site.
We decided to streamline the site, get rid of some of the pages that added little value and concentrate on the main pages, the net results was that I removed about 30000 pages.
Since doing that all the remaining pages except for 300 got hit with the "no title, no description" experience.
Lately Mr Googlebot has stopped visiting - usually it would have taken 10s of thousands of pages by this time in the month, but in April we've seen the bot come round just 60 times - googlebot just isn't crawling the site!
Obviously we knew there was something up! Today the site has gone to PR0. It had been sitting at PR5 for quite sometime and new links were being added quite frequently, although I should say most were probably reciprocal (we don't look for any but we get/got! a lot of requests).
In addition to PR0 we are now showing no backlinks in google, I have checked and we still have many links from PR4,5,6 sites that are also on topic.
But things didn't get really interesting until I noticed something else. It seems that nearly all of the remaining pages (that still exist on our site) have been relegated to the "supplemental results" index.
I suppose this shouldn't come as great surprise - the pages remaining were cached largely back in november/december, so since they aren't fresh it relegated them to the supplemental index.
I guess I now need to put all that together and figure out what the problem was. I know most of the popular theories on PR0 to do with duplicate content and bad linking practise, but we didn't do that. I can't help thinking google got fed up getting 404s from all the pages I deleted and decided the site was no longer running (or something like that) and hence it has given up trying to index it and stripped all the PR/backlinks.
Perhaps Mr GoogleGuy could let me know if the 404 theory is a possibility!
Cheers
This is not likely provided your home page was always online.
Look somewhere else...
