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I just lost my PageRank, it went from PR4 to PR0, yes PR Zero. Nothing, no value... panic. A google backlink check also showed no incoming links! Holy diapers Batman what is happening? Whaat did I do wrong? Why am I being penalised?
A check on google.com shows me that I still have links (link:http://www.conanstevens.com) and a few quick searches for my top keywords show that I am still in the search index.... Whew... That is good news, even with Pagerank zero I have not been delisted by Google.
Why is this important and what is going on?
PageRank is important as it is Google's way of valuing how 'important' your website is on the web, it is one of the factors (a main factor) in determining where your page will rank when someone searches Google.com.
The higher you place in the search results, the more people will come to your site. The more people come to your site the more money you make, or in my case the more people who know about me the more chance I have of making useful contacts in Hollywood.
So it is important to get a high PageRank.
So why did my previously respected site drop to PR0? And more importantly how do I get it back???
First stop the Earners Forums where after a quick search and browse I asked what was happening. Then I hit forums.DigitalPoint.com , Webmasterworld.com, webmaster-talk.com and a google search to find out what was happening.
It seems that many sites that previously had a good PR had dropped to PageRank Zero.
Some people were speculating that it was a recent reaction by Google to de-index sites that were selling links or buying links for Page Rank Juice (PR passes through links to other sites). This is when you buy a link on a 'trusted' site with high PR to get a link to your page so that your PageRank increases and you get a higher PR on your site. This has recently been banned by Google and they have stated that they will be punishing websites that do this.
So what's the big deal with Google anyway, there are 100's of search engines and there is always Yahoo and MSN search engines. Well Google sends me 88% of my search traffic, about 9% from Yahoo and the rest make up 3%. With a PR that dropped to 0 I am in serious likelyhood of loosing most of my traffic.
Many search engines license the Google engine and database, so if you are out of Google you are out of hundreds of search engines.
After reading a bit more I found from some older hands that the Pagerank falling to zero has happened before on a Google PR update (they update pagerank irregularly about every 3 months) and to sit tight and wait a few days before hitting the panic button.
All of us who had our page rank drop to PR0 still had normal traffic levels, a quick check told me that my google traffic was usual for a saturday. The older hands said that if we were penalised and dropped to PR0 then the 1st indication would be a sharp decline in traffic.
So I left it for a night and checked Page Rank at Multiple Datacenters in the morning, 3 out of 37 datacenters had me listed at PR4, the rest were PR0, I checked 15 minutes later and I now had 7 datacenters listing me at PR4, the rest still at Page Rank 0.
Good, it continues to propagate, my site was not punished or de-indexed in any way, it was just a Google PR update, but my PR stayed the same PR4.
A quick check over at a few other sites I have shows that I have gained PR3 at two of them and PR1 at another, and another 4 subdomains are now PR3. This is nice as each of them was previously PR0, it also means I am doing things correctly and should continue to see additional traffic and additional revenue from Google.
If you are experiencing a similar problem, don't panic, take the same steps I took - check your search listings to see if you are still there for your keywords and look at your traffic logs. If these have not changed then it is likely that the PR drop to zero is a temporary problem or update happening at Google.
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