Is there any help for a site that was down...?

[franklin dematto]

My site was down for a few weeks, and, whoa!, my PR seems to have dropped from 6 to 4. Since that's a logarithmic scale, that's a decrease to 1% of what it was!

Yes, now I realize that I should have made sure to keep the site up, but my prime focus during those weeks was performing the business which the site advertises, and I didn't have time to fix the site itself, alas....

Is there any hope for my site? Will the PR go back up by itself, and in how long? Would I gain, loose, or stay the same by switching to a new domain name (something which I plan on doing anyway for non SE related reasons)?

[jimbeetle]

Hi franklin,

The fact that your site is still indexed and shows a PR suggests that Google crawled it either before or after you had problems with the site. If otherwise it would probably show a gray bar.

It's always hard to say what caused a change in PR after an update. It can usually be explained by slight changes in the algorithm or adjustment of PR for incoming links. You can always help increase your PR by building more incoming links. As for a new domain, you would have to make the switch in such a way that your current PR gets transferred to the new site, you don't want to start from scratch. There are a few threads on the board concerning this, do searches for transfer domain, switch domain, etc., and you shold find some good info (or someone else might be along soon).

Bottom line: build more links and more solid content, keep the site up and wait for the next update or two.

Jim

[ciml]

Do the main links showing for a link:www.yourdomain.com search in Google show some good ones missing? If so, then that's probably why. If the reduction is due to your server problems (likely if you have plenty of deep links coming in) then I'd say your PageRank is likely to return at the next update.

As Jim writes, more links and more solid content are needed, but reliable hosting is crucial too (we all learn that at some point:().