No PageRank but good Moz stats?

[Bondara]

Hi,

Why would a website with good Moz stats such as DA/PA 45, mR/mT 5.0+ have 0 PageRank?

Have these sites done something? I have seen some sites with similar Moz stats have PR3/4 and when I have checked a year later the PR has dropped to 0.

Does that indicate Google has hit those sites and removed their PageRank?

Thanks.

[TomRayner]

There's a good chance of that - a drop like that would normally mean its PageRank has been penalised.

If you can verify this with some suspicious looking backlinks via Open Site Explorer, then I would steer clear.

[Bondara]

Cheers Tom, helpful.

What happens if the domain has been around for years and did have a PR3 which dropped to PR0.

I'm guessing they have been hit and any outbounds won't pass PR anymore.

[TomRayner]

They possibly may have been penalised, or they could just be new-ish sites where the majority of their good links have come in the recent weeks/months.

Google's toolbar PageRank only updates every 3-4 months, so it's possible that during this time the page in question could have acquired all of those links to give it a healthy Moz score.

You can check this by popping the URL into the wayback machine and see when it was last archived, checking the whois data of the site and see when it was registered and also by checking the recency of its backlinks with Ahrefs - the free version will give you a link graph of when the links have been acquired.

Anything after February 11th or something around that mark is when the PR toolbar updated, so if you can see a lot of links to that page after that date, the page and domain should be fine, it just hasn't had the chance to have its PR updated.

Hope this helps.