PR0 after 301

I think this is backwards

[dingman]

This is not a crisis in my life, since the affected page is just a personal thing of use to me and probably nobody else. However, I'm confused.

My personal site used to be located at my alma mater, at cs.alma-mater.edu/~me/. About a year ago, I coppied it over to family-name.org/~me. Google knew about both of them, and the only problem in my mind was that the stuff at cs.alma-mater.edu was outdated. The pages were both spidered, and came up when I ego-surfed, but had no page rank.

A little while ago, I got sick of the outdated content and put up a 301 redirect on the old site. No more duplicate content, but now I have a PR0 instead of no PR. Huh?

Did I somehow commit a sin in the eyes of Google, or have they simply recognized that in the grand scheme of things, nobody but me cares about my bookmarks and resume? If I'm offending googlebot somehow, I want to know it so I don't trash the page rank on something more important in the future.

[Hoople]

If the new site is the one in your profile it does come up as a 'domain-name.tld' style search with no ransome note or cached page. Might change after the next update. How long ago was the change from .edu to new .TLD? Have you submitted a delete request on the .edu site also?

[dingman]

Yes, the new site is the one in my profile. The 301 was added October 26. I have not submitted a delete request, since I figured the redirect was enough. Should I have?

[ciml]

October 26 was before the last update, so I would expect any changes to have shown in the November update.

Are there pages with real PageRank that linked to either the old or the new address before October 31 and still do? If so then it seems odd..

[dingman]

As far as I know, the only link to either the old or the new address from a page with real page rank is a link from the home of one of my slide show sites. The page with the link is PR1 (it's the home of the site) and every other page in that site is PR5 (the actual slides and the thumbnails.) My other travel slide show is likewise PR5, but it has no "home" to be lower ranked than the photos, and both are linked from the site that now has a PR0 on all pages.

The change wasn't exactly a drop - it went from a grayed-out bar to a PR0, but my understanding had been that PR0 was a penalty, whereas the greyed out bar was just an unimportant site. Frankly, I'm in agreement that this is an unimportant site, so if that's all the change from a grayed-out bar to a white one means, then it's nothing to worry about. If it does mean that I offended googlebot, though, I want to know how so I can avoid doing it again.

[rfgdxm1]

PR0 doesn't necessarily mean a penalty. It can also mean a site with no or insignificant inbound links. Sounds like exactly your case.

[jimbeetle]

The PR0 might actually be be PR<1.

When we were gray bar we received zero Google referrals. Nada. Zilch.

After October update the site changed to a white bar and started receiving traffic from Google again. Slowly increasing, up to a few hundred month now.

From observation I'd have to say that gray bar is, as they say, not ranked, and *possibly* also the penalty indicator. But there are so many differing opinions on this who the heck really knows.

It can't hurt to remove the old site, it's pretty straightforward:

[google.com...]

Jim

[dingman]

Removal looks pretty much pointless, since a search for "site:cs.alma-mater.edu myusername" doesn't bring up any results in my old site anymore. "site:newdomain.tld myusername" brings up three pages worth of results, so google seems pretty clear on where I live now.

If the white bar isn't necessarily a penalty, I'll go ahead and assume it's not one. After all, I can't think of anything I'm doing that Google would object to. I haven't even made any effort to optimise my personal site for anything other than accessibility and standards-compliance.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who took time to help me figure out if I'd done something wrong.