What could cause a drop in pagerank
-
Our home page pagerank dropped from 4 to 3.
nlpca(dot)com
What are the possible things that could cause this?
-
Vahe,
I accidentally clicked 'Good Answer' twice for EGOL
Your answer was informative. I will be sure and get you next time.
-
"page rank" updates can be a cause - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-pagerank-update-14684.html
I wouldn't stress too much importance on PR.
Hope this helps,
Vahe
-
I recently was adding 4 keyword phrases per title (and one or 2 per URL) to many of the internal pages of nlpca(dot)com. Some of the keywords were a little off topic, but most were OK. Before I could continue and add the same keywords to the H1 and content, we got dropped from a 4 to a 3 in pagerank and we slipped 20 positions for our main keyword 'NLP' and others as well.
I very much doubt that this would cause a drop in pagerank. Pagerank problems are usually associated with link manipulation.
You say that you were adding off topic keywords to page titles. I believe that google imght consider that a small sin. I've never heard of google reducing pagerank for something like that but you never know what google will do and not tell people about it - but a visible pagerank drop is a warning.
Did you get any messages in webmaster tools?
Using off-topic title tags is a cousin to cloaking. It conveys to searchers that you have that off-topic content on your page and then when they arrive and you don't have it they are not happy. They feel like they have been spammed. Google might detect this by bounce rate or some form of report from searchers. They might also detect it from during a automated review of your content.
One experience that I had was with a group of about 80 pages. I published them to see where they ranked then edited all of the title tags, see where they rank, edited the title tags and see where they rank, and then did it again. Those 80 pages all took a big hit. They stayed down for about a year before recovering their original rankings - which were quite good.
That's all I can say. Lots of the above is not "hard evidence". Just what looks to me like cause and effect and guesses at what google might do.
-
As per EGOL, it is both. Another thing with the changes you are making to the pages, if you change things to the point that the meta desc. does not match the content, you will cause a higher bounce rate because when someone clicks, sees something other than what they thought they would see, they leave. That will also affect PR (IMO).
EGOL nails a lot here.
-
Thanks again for your always excellent information EGOL
Let's talk about this one:
-- doing something naughty that makes google drop your pagerank as a warning or as a punishment
I recently was adding 4 keyword phrases per title (and one or 2 per URL) to many of the internal pages of nlpca(dot)com. Some of the keywords were a little off topic, but most were OK. Before I could continue and add the same keywords to the H1 and content, we got dropped from a 4 to a 3 in pagerank and we slipped 20 positions for our main keyword 'NLP' and others as well.
I'm trying to determine if Google dinged us for this, or if it was something else, and if we will come back up - it's all fixed - I'm using one or 2 appropriate keywords per page except for the home page, and I've added appropriate H1 and content (3 times per keyword phrase)
But we're not going back up.
Looking for some of your brilliant advice EGOL
-
Several things can cause a drop in page rank of the homepage
-- loss of links to the homepage or any part of the site
-- important sites that link to you loose some of their links and thus have less pagerank to pass on to you
-- changes in the links that important sites have up to you - changing the code so that they do not pass pagerank - these could be connections through a script
-- changes in the linkage structure of your site that change the flow of pagerank through it
-- periodically google recalibrates pagerank (If they didn't tons of sites would be making it to ten. This is a math adjustment similar to adjusting for inflation. If your site gains PR at a lower rate than the web average your pagerank could go down
-- adding a ton of pages to your site could cause a drop in pagerank as pagerank flows out of your main site and into those pages - similar to adding a new wing onto a swimming pool and then connecting them to allow water to flow in
-- (some people will disagree with this one
-- adding a lot of links to your site that connect to other websites
-- doing something naughty that makes google drop your pagerank as a warning or as a punishment
-- if your site just recently earned four, maybe it was a very low four, now your site is showing as a very high three, this could just be flux in the calculations and rounding... keep earning links and four will return soon
-
Is pagerank on-site or off-site factors?
-
Bob,
Remember, PR is arrived at mathematically and any change to a variable will cause a change to the result. That said, usually the minor changes with loss of a link here or there, addition of same, on page changes, we do not notice right away because Google only adjusts on occasion and not internet wide (I keep asking for the schedule but they won't give it to me). Now, if you had dropped from 4 to 0 or 1, that would be different in my opinion and a signal something was amiss in the eyes of Oz.
Best
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
-
Odd one - dropping positions but traffic improving
Seem to have a bit of an odd one. For the last few months been running a backlink campaign for a 2/3 year old site, got good positions for some keywords/pages but seems to have plateaued the last 60 days or so with some keywords dropping in position.
Link Building | | seoman10
The odd thing is traffic seems to be still improving (according to GA and GSC). I am wondering if - have hit a niche ceiling
or rankbrain type thing i.e. google trying to work out what the site should be ranking for and messing with positions.
or because it is just a newish site. Any ideas?2 -
DA drop down
Hello, I am the administrator of einricht.com . My site DA drop down 6 to 4. How can I recover the Bad links for increasing DA?
Link Building | | cnibkunpeffob0 -
Rankings Dropped After New Backlinks.
I have a low-traffic website (under 100 unique visitors per day) and I've encountered a strange issue started yesterday morning. I acquired three back-links, one of these back-links is contextual and the other two are site-wide. The site-wide back-links are from PA 40+ blogs. It looks like the back-links are already indexed by Google. Despite these new back-links, my rankings across multiple keywords have dropped several positions. I'm new to SEO, but I would assume new back-links would improve my rankings. None of these back-links are low quality links, they are from real established blogs with high domain and page authority values. Could anyone give me insights into why my rankings may have dropped with new back-links?
Link Building | | poke11 -
Drop in Rankings After Removing Links
So I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before? I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this? Thanks
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
On my latest report we have dropped one point on Domain authority. I also note that our 3 competitor rankings have dropped as well. Has something changed to make this occur.
On my latest report we have dropped one point on Domain authority. I also note that our 3 competitor rankings have dropped as well. Has something changed to make this occur.
Link Building | | Fodders0 -
Rank dropped suddenly. Ways to bounce back?
So, like million threads out there I lost my rank for a particular page and is looking to bounce back. However there might be something different in my case, hence the thread. 1. The rank drop was an after effect of design change, where we merged two pages together. Page A - which was ranking for Keyword A and Page B which was ranking for Keyword B. So we merged it together in the sense that both had similar content and design except the meta tags and page title (I wasn't involved in this project so...) and Page B gets kicked out of Google web index. Page A still remains number 1 for Keyword A. 2. There was some shady link building contract that was implemented some 3 months back (again me not involved, I joined later) and there were an unnatural number of links created with a striking artificial anchor text pattern from low quality "built for link building" blogs. I presume this also affected page B. as this effort was done only for Page B and not A. So now, I managed to clear all the pages for duplicate content, implement a better page structure where I deleted out possible similar pages, redirected them (301) to main pages, and created a new page for Page B, like Page B1 with different content. Implemented a better internal linking profile too where terms related to Page B (Keyword B, Keyword B1, B2 etc) links to Page B. Its been two months now, and Page B ranks for Keyword B1 but not the original Keyword B. I suppose the "penalty" still remains in Google. Any clues how I can get around this? What I want to achieve is to get ranked for Keyword B for Page B, if not the first result, at least start all over from a lower rank but at least break out of the penalty.
Link Building | | Druva0 -
Drop in the external links
Hi, We notice a sudden drop in our external links over a month (May to June). The numbers have fallen drastically from ~55K to ~28K.The followed linking root domains has changed from 781 to 776. I am using OSE to download the inbound links data an analyse, however the downloaded csv lists only about 25 links from every domain so I am unable to figure how we have lost the external links over time. But, the Domain Mozrank has seen a gradual increase. Now I suspect the reason for the DA of our site to fall from 58 to 57 is mainly because of the external links loss. Am I right in assuming this? Is there a way to figure out the lost links? Please help! Thanks,
Link Building | | madedotcom0 -
Domain Autorithy drop from 18 to 14!!
Hello, I was surprised today by my domain autorithy drop from 18 to 14 in one single day. A couple of days ago I started to use Hubspot demo and for some strange reoson yesterday I had a huge ammount of visits yesterday. My domain autorithy was 18 yesterday and today is 14 and the links to my site increased almost 1500. Whats is happening? Tks in advance! Pedro Pereira
Link Building | | PedroM0