Front page dropped to PR1 - thoughts?
-
The front page of our site dropped in late March from PR4 to PR1. Yes, I know toolbar PR isn't terribly reliable, isn't much of an indicator of overall SEO, etc. - however, upper management will want to know what happened and what is being done to fix it.
Of course, the answer is obvious: go build links. But what might the cause be? As I mentioned in a past Q&A, the site is entirely encrypted and as a result may be causing us to leak some juice (http backlinks of course make up the vast majority of our links). We're planning to fix this once the site is ported over to a CMS, but that's still months off. Other than that, what might be the problem? Any ideas?
-
@Frank: As to paid links, I highly doubt it. My supervisors and I are pretty militant against black hat, and I know I haven't bought any links. I can run another backlink report tonight, but it's not likely we'll find any. I have found a handful (i.e. not even half a dozen) random links that appear highly spammy, but they aren't on interrelated sites/link neighborhoods, so I don't think that's the issue.
-
Another idea that you need to examine... the company hasn't bought any links, or become involved with what might be considered 'Black Hat' SEO, has it?
I say this only because if any Black Hat SEO occurred, and Google slightly caught on to it, they might have intentionally lowered your toolbar PageRank to send you a message before taking any sort of direct action.
-
I gave that a good deal of consideration. The drop didn't actually occur until late March. The update was reported on February 24, and as of a day later we had not yet seen the PR drop. However, as some webmasters complained they got unfairly penalized, I went back and revisited our organic traffic. Before and after the update was reported on February 24, we experienced a post-Farmer drop of less than 4 percent for non-branded traffic. Overall our Google organic traffic actually increased by nearly 30 percent. In addition, we don't really have any article links (this site is just now getting optimized). So I just don’t see that we got Farmerslapped. However, I'm happy to be proven wrong, so do you recommend other ways of detecting?
-
Yeah, I'd have to agree with Andrew. Same thing happened to us!
-
I'm pretty sure this is the domino effect.
Google's Panda update made content farms lose Page Rank. Therefore, outgoing Page Rank was reduced from the content farms. A lot of us had a ton of links from content farms, which were then devalued as well. Voilà, Page Rank reduced.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Drop in performance
Some pages in Search Console have troubles in indexing. Although Google Index says url is on google and indexed , Live test shows something different( image is attached ). My performance has badly been affected(image attached). Anybody knows what the problem is? R5iCT20
Technical SEO | | ehsanamel0 -
Why blocking a subfolder dropped indexed pages with 10%?
Hy Guys, maybe you can help me to understand better: on 17.04 I had 7600 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 6113). I have included in the robots.txt file, Disallow: /account/ - which contains the registration page, wishlist, etc. and other stuff since I'm not interested to rank with registration form. on 23.04 I had 6980 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 5985). I understand that this way I'm telling google I don't want that section indexed, by way so manny pages?, Because of the faceted navigation? Cheers
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Too Many On-Page Links?
How much would this affect my page ranks performance? There are many Too Many On-Page Links? warning on my campaign. should I address this issue right away to fix it or leave it as it would not matter seriously ? I've looked at some of the pages and think all of them are necessary. Could someone help me? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LauraHT0 -
Too many on page links
Yes this question again. I know it get's asked a lot and I know of a few fixes, but this one I'm having a problem with. So we have a fan gallery on our site which is not only causing duplicate page titles, which I'm thinking we can fix with a canonical, but also too many on page links. The issue is this is on drupal which I have very little experience with and it seems to just be located within the fan galleries section of the site. After looking at a few things I know that no-follow wont be an option since from what I read it wont really work anyway so I was wondering if anyone else has an asnwer. I just read through a million articles trying to find a simular situation and can't seem to find anyone with the same thing. It might have something to do with the plugins the programmers used, but my inexperience with drupal is making this difficult. Thanks guys.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
Malware ranking drops
Hi, One of our sites got hit with malware in November. We cleaned it up and sent a reconsideration request and no malware warnings are in WMT anymore. We still haven't seen an improvement in rankings even though people say it can take up to 90days? Organic traffic is down 40% and still dropping. Any advice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
How do I know which page a link is from
I've got an interesting situation. I hope you can help. I have a list of links but I'm not sure which pages of my site they are from. How do I know which page a specific link is from? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | VinceWicks0 -
Page that has no link is being crawled
http://www.povada.com/category/filters/metal:Silver/nstart/1/start/1.htm I have no idea how the above page was even found by google but it seems that it is being crawled and Im not sure where its being found from. Can anyone offer a solution?
Technical SEO | | 13375auc30