Lost page rank, am I in the sandbox?
-
Hi,
Our page rank was 5 for the last 3 months. Before it was 4 for a long time. Today our page rank dropped to 0 and I have no idea why.. We didn't buy any links or did anything wrong..
I also checked every keyword rankings we are on but we didn't loose our spot in any keyword..
Is it a short term thing, or am I in the sandbox? How can I fix this problem or avoid from a worse situation..?
- We just changed the site template few times in last two months..
Thanks
-
Thanks a lot. It is a relief.
-
Nice Article. Thanks for the advice.
-
Onur
That's good to hear. My only concern is the perception that your "google rank" was affected somehow.
It's not your google rank. It's a publicly shared generalized numeric value Google puts out for curious onlookers. It's not based in reality.
-
Alan,
thanks for the info. We didn't loose any traffic. Everything looks fine except our google rank.
-
If you were in the sandbox you would have no doubt about it, hehe
The truth is, when you get sandboxed you can expect a drop around 90% (if not 100%) of your visits from organic Google, thats the stat you look to check if it has happened or not
-
My tool shows you with a PR=3 ... Not quite a 5 but much better than zero. I don't think you are in the sandbox. Just growing pains.
-
Changing your site template should not have effected your page rank. Matt Cutts from Google explains that page rank is a formula based on backlinks and the quality of them.
I wouldn't stress too much about your PR. What matters the most is how well you are ranking. If you haven't dropped in your keyword rankings, then you have not been sandboxed. Just continue to focus on building quality backlinks. Build your PR back up.
-
The "page rank" you refer to - is this the ToolBar PageRank? If so, relax, take a step back and consider this:
1. TBPR is an inaccurate indicator.
2. TBPR is not updated for months at a time, and thus does not reflect timely reality.
3. TBPR is irrelevant to professional SEO
4. You say you didn't lose any rankings
5. The real and only question that matters is this:
Did you see a dramatic drop in visits coming from organic search queries?
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
-
Desktop Ranking Disappeared After URL Change; Mobile Ranking Improved
A client's developer moved a site onto a new (WordPress) CMS, where the only change was URLs - the front end code stayed the same. The site is 10+ years old and previously had fantastic rankings (#1-4) with inner pages for some relatively generic search phrases (eg 10,000 searches / month in the UK, per Keyword Planner). Now, on Desktop searches the site isn't appearing anywhere in the 300+ results for a key search phrase, where it used to rank between #2-4; however over the last 3 weeks on Mobile the site ranks better than before, even though the site isn't at all mobile-friendly (it's over 10 years old). During the move, there were some errors by their developer: mistakenly left in a sitewide rel=canonical tag referring to the homepage 3-4 301s before finally reaching new URLs a lot of 301s missed (250+ crawl errors appeared in Search Console) page content differentiation by parameter, instead of individual URLs For example, the page that used to rank for the targeted phrase, this left 4 different URLs indexed, with the same content. To tackle this, we have so far: put in correct rel=canonical tags set up Search Console to recognise URL parameter as differentiating content fixed all crawl errors appearing in Search Console added a link direct to the problem page, direct from the homepage stopped duplicate content being indexed (including for the page in question) ensured the page load speed is still good (< 0.75s) Ranking for Desktop over Mobile would make sense, but not Mobile over Desktop! I'd really appreciate any advice on how to tackle this. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | magicdust0 -
Why Google ranks a page with Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW?
Hi guys, I was playing with the new OSE when I found out a weird thing: if you Google "performing arts school london" you will see w w w . mountview . org. uk at the 3rd position. The point is that page has "Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", why Google indexed it? Here you can see the robots.txt allows Google to index the URL but not the content, in article they also say the meta robots tag will properly avoid Google from indexing the URL either. Apparently, in my case that page is the only one has the tag "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", but it's the home page. so I said to myself: OK, perhaps they have just changed that tag therefore Google needs time to re-crawl that page and de-index following the no index tag. How long do you think it will take to don't see that page indexed? Do you think it will effect the whole website, as I suppose if you have that tag on your home page (the root domain) you will lose a lot of links' juice - it's totally unnatural a backlinks profile without links to a root domain? Cheers, Pierpaolo
Technical SEO | | madcow780 -
From page 1th to page 18th @ Google
Hello Mozzers! I have a question, you may help.. How may it be possible that a page ranking well (1th result) goes from 1th result to the 18th page just in 1 day? It doesnt seem to be any kind of penalization.. I now had all suspicious outgoing links to be nofollow (they were not before), this may be a cause .. (?) Do you have any other suggestion? Thanks
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
If the order of products on a page changes each time the page is loaded, does this have a negative effect on the SEO of those pages?
Hello, a client of mine has a number of category pages that each have a list of products. Each time the page is reloaded the order of those products changes. Does this have a negative effect on the pages' rankings? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Kerry_Jones2 -
Website ranking went from page one to not in top 50 overnight. Help/suggestions?
One of our customer's websites initially ranked very well. For approximately 3 months it sat atop of Google for their optimized keywords. Suddenly, on November 17th, the ranking dropped and they were no longer in the top 50 for any keywords. We went through Google Webmaster tools and found no violations, so we emailed Google to see if we violated something and if they would reconsider. They responded "We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google." This is a site built on WordPress, so we turned off a majority of plugins in case one was somehow affecting the site. They have an incredible amount of business partners that link their website from their partner's website menus, so they have about 15,000 links all with anchor text "insurance." (every page on partner site is seen as a different link). Think this is affecting it? Maybe Google sees it as artificial? (P.S. This has been set up this way for a while before they came on with us). The site ranks on page one of Bing and Yahoo, but nowhere in top 50 for Google. Any suggestions? Appreciate the help!
Technical SEO | | Tosten0 -
Can leaving up old web pages no longer accessible through my site navigation hurt my rankings?
My firm recently overhauled a client's website. As part of the project, we gave the content a new structure, eliminating certain pages and creating several new ones. However, I just found out that some of the "old" pages (the ones we supposedly eliminated) still appear in the Google SERPs. Somehow, the client - who handled the coding - let these pages remain live even though they can no longer be accessed through the site navigation. This seems like something that could hurt the client's SEO rankings, but I want to make sure before contacting the client and suggesting they take down the old pages. Can anyone confirm my suspicion?
Technical SEO | | matt-145670 -
Sub-Page Ranks for a Main Keyword
A sub page now ranks for my main key word (the file name is exact match to the key word) it completely replaced my index page in rankings. Would 301 redirecting the sub-page to my index page (which is more informative and has a whole lot more links pointing towards it) be a good idea or vice versa? Or would optimizing that page (the sub page) be the best way to go (the sub page doesn't have single inbound link pointing to...). This happened about a week ago. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Benj7070 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages. The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title. e.g. Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products MasterPet Product page1 MasterPet Product page2 Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title. From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this? Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Peter.Huxley590