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
-
How to rank 1 page for multiple keywords in the new way
Hi There It has been a little while since I was involved with KW's in earnest. 1.5 years ago and beyond I did really well with SEO. I'm not in a hugely competitive market but we found our keywords, we wrote great web pages for 1,2,3 keywords and when we found more great keywords that we built a new page to rank for. For example: One big hitting keyword was "Rugged PDA", we created a category page for Rugged PDA's. Another was "Rugged Handheld" so we had a new page for that. We then long tailed "semi rugged PDA", "waterproof rugged PDA" etc etc and built sub category pages. We were legit, did lots of content marketing, ran a blog tweeted etc and we did really well to be honest. However these days it's not working, One of Rand's whiteboard sessions stated that you need to build bigger topic based pages that delivered on more keywords (The one about shoes!). This is great as we love that idea as we can have 1 big category page that offers great value to the visitor, however I am struggling to work out how we target a bigger list of keywords to the one page or to fewer pages. To underline this the MOZ page rankers also still seem to work in the same way where they expect 1 or 2 KW's per page to get A ranks to them, so I'm confused!! For example Rugged PDA is an old term, Google trends is showing that it's glory days are over and we know that the term "Rugged Smartphone" is the one to use as we all use smartphones not PDAs these days. However we also see a lot about Rugged + Phone, Mobile, Cell, Handheld, tablet, device, phablet... all relevant to one big category page. So I run these KW's through google search to see if the same pages come up as a test to see if Google thinks they all mean the same, I get a few, but not much overlap. How do we therefore have 1 page that talks about all kinds of great stuff about the "Rugged smartphone" but one that also targets rugged handheld, rugged android device etc etc? I've spent 2 days catching up, i'm none the wiser on this specific element but i'm sure I am just missing one key element of common sense here and any help is very much appreciated. Regards Dave
Technical SEO | | Raptor-crew0 -
Page Speed or Size?
Hi everyone. I have a client who really wants to add a 1min html5 video to the background of their homepage. I have managed to reduce the size of the video to 20MB and I have tested the page in pingdom. The results are 1.85 s to load, and weighed in at 21.2 MB. My question is does Google factor page load speed or size in it's ranking factors? I am also mindful of the negative effect this could have on bounce rate. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | WillWatrous0 -
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
After I 301 redirect duplicate pages to my rel=canonical page, do I need to add any tags or code to the non canonical pages?
I have many duplicate pages. Some pages have 2-3 duplicates. Most of which have Uppercase and Lowercase paths (generated by Microsoft IIS). Does this implementation of 301 and rel=canonical suffice? Or is there more I could do to optimize the passing of duplicate page link juice to the canonical. THANK YOU!
Technical SEO | | PFTools0 -
Unstable ranking
Hello, I own a website wich lately (since like few months ago) have a unstable ranking, I mean that one day I get 800 organic visits (good sells) and then a week when organic visits fall to 700,600,500,400.. then up again Why does this happen? I am lossing ranking :S site : todorepuestoselectro(dot)com Thank you very much im learning a lot here!
Technical SEO | | matiw0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Google Sandboxing
I have a new site with a new domain that ranked well the 1st week or so after it was indexed then it totally dropped off the SERP. My question is, does Google Sandboxing affect new sites on new domains that don't have any incoming links? The site dropped off before I began link building - from what I've read unnatural link build is often the cause. Can you still be sandboxed without any link building? If this is the case, are there things I can do to get out of the sandbox? Thanks folks, Jason
Technical SEO | | OptioPublishing0