Page Rank Clarification Request

[buddy]

I would appreciate your feedback on the following topic.

For the past year my site was listed on the 1st page in Google for it's main keyword phrase. Two indexings ago it's page rank dropped from 5PR on the index page to 2PR. On all of the other 125 pages it dropped from a 4PR to 0PR. However, it still maintained it's rankings up until the latest indexing on 1/26/03. After this indexing it kept the same page rank but is not showing up for ANY of it's keywords.

My question is;

If I've received a penalty then why isn't the entire site 0PR?

Since my index page is a 2PR shouldn't some of the other pages display a 1PR?

Thank You

[troels nybo nielsen]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, buddy. You would be surprised to know how many members we get because they have run into trouble in the Google update!

> Since my index page is a 2PR shouldn't some of the other pages display a 1PR?

PR is not figured that way. It is figured individually for each page. Only if a PR has not been figured yet Google makes a guesstimate, which in your case would most likely be one notch down from the known PR of the main page.

The PR for those other pages _does_ sound low, but a white bar does not necessarily mean 0. It may simply be lower than 1. Also it would be nice to know how your internal linking structure is.

> If I've received a penalty then why isn't the entire site 0PR?

I don't think you've received a penalty. I may be wrong, but I think that you have simply been seriously hit by a tweak in Google's algo.

[jomaxx]

Maybe a lot of your inbound links (or one important link) disappeared or were invalidated because they were in some form of guestbook or link farm.

[troels nybo nielsen]

Oops, I forgot that! Valid point.

[egomaniac]

I agree with the above posts. I doubt you have been hit with a penalty. I think first your PR dropped because the pages pointing to you lost PR. Secondly, as troels_nybo_nielsen says, a 0 PR on the toolbar isn't necessarily 0. It is just something less than 1. The toolbar shows whole integer values, which are rounded off approximations of that page's real PR value. So you main page could be PR 2.21 and your internal pages could be 0.89 and they would show as PR 2 and PR 0 (I am assuming that the Google Toolbar always rounds down - noone knows for sure how it rounds off).

As for losing your rankings an update *after* losing your PR, yes that could just be a change in the algo this month.

Go get some new links :)

[buddy]

Thank you all for your feedback. I now have better understanding regarding the page rank issues with my site. I'm glad to hear that a white bar doesn't necessarily 0PR.

buddy

[rfgdxm1]

Question: were you doing anything fishy on this site that could justify a penalty? If not, either some sites quit linking to yours, or perhaps they were down when Googlebot spidered.