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I appreciate the help and advice I received from this forum in the past.
My web site strictly adhere to the ethics of search engine optimization. We do not use any tricks in our SEO plan and maintains a distance from those who practices spam.
The current Google update was my sites' fourth update experience. In the second update it was assigned a PR4 - in next update it became PR6 - in the recent update ( i do not have any idea why ) it was demoted to PR5. I am not able to identify any reason for this penalty.
I do not use any reciprocal linkage s/w, do not link to sites with pr < 4, do not link to sites that use reciprocal link s/w.
I have not made any major change to my site except the design of my homepage. Please have a look at my site and help me identify the reason for penalty. The previous design of my homepage can be seen from the google's cache snapshot. I personally feel that has got nothing to do with the PR.
[My site's rank in the search engine results was promoted from the third page to the second page :)]
The previous design of my homepage can be seen from the google's cache snapshot. I personally feel that has got nothing to do with the PR.
You're correct in that -- PageRank has nothing directly to do with the design of your site. It's a measure of the links that point to each page on your site, and nothing more.
A decrease in PageRank of your index page can be attributed either to a decrease in the number of sites that link to you, or a drop in the PageRank of some number of those sites -- so they have less PageRank to pass on to you.
The PageRank of your internal pages, though, could be affected by a redesign of that meant a change in the site's internal link structure. PageRank is passed between your own pages, so you can, to an extent, manage how it's distributed to your various pages.
a decrease in the number of sites that link to you, or a drop in the PageRank of some number of those sites
This is a phenomenom known as Link Rot. The only way to combat Link Rot is to regularly cultivate new links.
And don't be a link hog by conserving your outbound links. GoogleGuy stated last month that Google considers this too.
Isn't pagerank also affected by how many other sites are in existance for your "google determined" keywords and how popular they are?
Short answer: no. :)
While other factors go into the algorithms that determine how results will be ranked for a given query, PageRank is simply a mathematically-derived value meant to measure the number and "quality" of the links that point to a page. Each page gets a certain amount of "PageRank" from each other page (whether on the same site or not) that links to it. The higher a page's own PageRank, the more it will pass on through its links, and the more outgoing links a page has, the less PR will be passed through each of them.
But it has nothing to do with keywords or the theme of the text content on the site or how competitive the keywords you're trying to target are.
As the database grows, the pages at the top of the scale continue to gain more and more links.
That creates a situation where the range of scores each toolbar notch represents must occasionally be recalculated.
It could be that your actual PR score has actually increased even though your toolbar PR dropped a notch.
As long as your site is still showing up in SERPS, you don't have anything to worry about.
