Went from PR5 to PR3

Got a link on a directory and go my PR

[phillypleez]

Man, this sucks. I had a PR5 and then went to PR3 after I added 3 listings in a directory. (I think the directory had a PR3) Do you think it was because I had three links on the same directory? (I added them to different categories and submitted each of those pages to google) Or maybe it might be some other factor... I recently redesigned my site using cold fusion instead of just html. Any thoughts? Suggestions?

[rogerd]

It's hard to say why your PR dropped, phillypleez. It could be a toolbar malfunction, or perhaps a loss in PR of another link.

It's very unlikely that adding a few inbound links from a remote directory depressed your PR.

It's possible the switch to ColdFusion had an effect if Google dropped your old pages because they no longer exist, but hasn't spidered the new pages. Do the cfm pages have query strings? They will probably get spidered, but may not rank as well as straight html pages.

I'd study my backlinks and indexed pages for clues.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld! :)

[storevalley]

Hi phillypleez ...

Lots of the sites I monitor on a regular basis have suffered drops in PR over the past few months (as rogerd pointed out, this could just be a toolbar malfunction, though)

PR5 to PR3 seems to be a common story!

Are your positions in the SERPS/traffic levels suffering? The drop in PR hasn't made any real difference to the sites I have stats for.

[kevinpate]

Could be the changes you made haven't all been taken into account.

I'm not expert, but if, for example, your actual PR was
5.0000000021 and today the actual is 3.9999999998,
the changes and perhaps the loss of any significant (PR wise) links could result in 2 level drop that's actually
a hair over 1 level.

Another factor might be that if instead of losing,
you did grow, but you grew at a lesser rate than numerous other sites.

I seem to recall reading that the total available PR is finite. As new sites come online, and as established sites grow, shrink or disappear, the redistribution of PR means some sites (appear) to hold ground, some gain, and some lose ground.

I've seen a bit of our shoreline roll out with the tide as well this summer. Some of this is from slower growth perhaps, but undoubtedly some of it is the result of less than careful shuffling of my own feet as I wandered along SERP beach.

[storevalley]

I seem to recall reading that the total available PR is finite

I have seen big increases in the number of sites competing for many keyphrases I keep an eye on. So maybe you are on to something ... :)

[dougs]

What happened to you traffic is the more important question?

We recently had a PR7 drop to a PR3 and saw our traffic double. PR is good, rankings are better, relevant traffic is the gold.

Doug

[DaveN]

dougs bang on mate, ask the average user what Pagerank is and they won't know or care, if you can hold your rankings whilst losing PR it drives your competitors MAD..

DaveN

[dougs]

I loved the site being a PR3 as no one could work out why we were listed so well. I knew what we were doing and could guess, but alas the site came back as a PR7 and people could atleast try to work out what was happening.

Good listings and low Pr is what iŽd love

[Skier]

I seem to recall reading that the total available PR is finite

I just finished reading some technical stuff about this. As I understand it;

The total PR on the web = total # of pages on the web
The average PR of a page = One