Front page dropped to PR1 - thoughts?
-
The front page of our site dropped in late March from PR4 to PR1. Yes, I know toolbar PR isn't terribly reliable, isn't much of an indicator of overall SEO, etc. - however, upper management will want to know what happened and what is being done to fix it.
Of course, the answer is obvious: go build links. But what might the cause be? As I mentioned in a past Q&A, the site is entirely encrypted and as a result may be causing us to leak some juice (http backlinks of course make up the vast majority of our links). We're planning to fix this once the site is ported over to a CMS, but that's still months off. Other than that, what might be the problem? Any ideas?
-
@Frank: As to paid links, I highly doubt it. My supervisors and I are pretty militant against black hat, and I know I haven't bought any links. I can run another backlink report tonight, but it's not likely we'll find any. I have found a handful (i.e. not even half a dozen) random links that appear highly spammy, but they aren't on interrelated sites/link neighborhoods, so I don't think that's the issue.
-
Another idea that you need to examine... the company hasn't bought any links, or become involved with what might be considered 'Black Hat' SEO, has it?
I say this only because if any Black Hat SEO occurred, and Google slightly caught on to it, they might have intentionally lowered your toolbar PageRank to send you a message before taking any sort of direct action.
-
I gave that a good deal of consideration. The drop didn't actually occur until late March. The update was reported on February 24, and as of a day later we had not yet seen the PR drop. However, as some webmasters complained they got unfairly penalized, I went back and revisited our organic traffic. Before and after the update was reported on February 24, we experienced a post-Farmer drop of less than 4 percent for non-branded traffic. Overall our Google organic traffic actually increased by nearly 30 percent. In addition, we don't really have any article links (this site is just now getting optimized). So I just don’t see that we got Farmerslapped. However, I'm happy to be proven wrong, so do you recommend other ways of detecting?
-
Yeah, I'd have to agree with Andrew. Same thing happened to us!
-
I'm pretty sure this is the domino effect.
Google's Panda update made content farms lose Page Rank. Therefore, outgoing Page Rank was reduced from the content farms. A lot of us had a ton of links from content farms, which were then devalued as well. Voilà, Page Rank reduced.
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
-
Why Dropping pages from SERPS?
Our website for my olansi company in London, China has hundreds of pages dedicated to every service we provide to China local areas. The total number of pages is approximately 100. Google caters pretty well for long-tail searches when it indexes all these pages, so we usually get a fair amount of traffic when this happens. However, Google occasionally drops most of our indexed pages from search engine results for a few days or weeks at a time - for example, Google is currently indexing 60 pages while last week it was back at 100. Can you tell me why this happens? When these pages don't display, we lose a lot of organic traffic. What are we doing wrong? Site url:https://www.olanside.com
Technical SEO | | sesahoda0 -
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
Why is this page not ranking but is indexed?
I have a page http://jobs.hays.co.uk/jobs-in-norfolk and it is indexed by Google but will not show up for any keywords I try. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Too Many On-Page Links - caused by a drop down menu
Many of our e-com sites we build for customers have drop down menus to help the user easily find products without having to click - Example: http://www.customandcommercial.com/ But this then causes the report to trigger too many on page links We do have a site map and a google site map So should I put code in place not to follow the drop down menu link items or leave in place?
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0 -
My landing pages just dropped to zero in webmaster tools
According to google webmaster tools my landing pages just dropped from 1300 impressions 2 days ago to zero for the past 2 days. Have attached snippet of graph, URL of website is http://www.cheapcentralheating.co.uk - I have no idea whats happened here, and if anyone can advise or help I would be extremely grateful. landing_pages.jpg
Technical SEO | | nicklemonpromotions0 -
Getting More Pages Indexed
We have a large E-commerce site (magento based) and have submitted sitemap files for several million pages within Webmaster tools. The number of indexed pages seems to fluctuate, but currently there is less than 300,000 pages indexed out of 4 million submitted. How can we get the number of indexed pages to be higher? Changing the settings on the crawl rate and resubmitting site maps doesn't seem to have an effect on the number of pages indexed. Am I correct in assuming that most individual product pages just don't carry enough link juice to be considered important enough yet by Google to be indexed? Let me know if there are any suggestions or tips for getting more pages indexed. syGtx.png
Technical SEO | | Mattchstick0 -
Drop Down Menu as Pagination
Hi, We currently use a drop down menu option for our paginated pages using JavaScript, what would be the best search engine friendly way around this?
Technical SEO | | CameronT0