Page rank drop from 5 to 0

Hi there,

A site I work with cornerpocketpool.com had a page rank of 5 before and has dropped to 0 a few months back. I recently started working with it and don't know exactly when and don't know what might have caused it. Is there a way I can research what the cause might have been?

Is there a way to confirm that the site was PR 5 at one point?

Also, note that the site owner swears that nothing remotely blackhat was done on the site. They did build links rapidly resulting in about 2000 links per yahoo site explorer.

If anyone can find the precise reason for the page rank drop and suggest corrective measures, I would really appreciate that. I am know some SEO myself and have done my little bit to research the causes but haven't been able to figure it out.

Thanks,
Srini

Hello Srini,

Thanks for your post. The last Page Rank update occurred this November. The sites that I handle had an increase in their page rank. There could be 2 major reasons as to why your page rank could have decreased :

1) Backlinks: Quality backlinks determines your page rank. Note not all back-links that you receive contributes to your page rank value. Rather all the links that are indexed are shown by Google Toolbar add up to your page rank. The numbers of these links differ from the actual backlinks that point to your website. It could be that the pages where these backlinks were present are no longer being indexed by Google, hence the loss.

2) URL Architecture : The most friendly URL structure is If you have a cannonical error issue existing then Googl would consider these URL as individual urls and the PR value will be divided. A lengthy URL is not SEO friendly. Also proper internal linking within your website helps.

The last page rank update occurred at the end of december.(dec 31)

I believe the page rank drop happened several months ago.

The site has plenty of backlinks and they are not super quality but good.

The site structure part i am not so sure but difficult to believe that all of a sudden a site goes from PR 5 to PR 0 because of bad site strucuture??


Still puzzled by this one..

Srini

I just took a quick look of there links on yahoo and they have about 500 rubbish links as far as I can see. Just article directories and blogs. None of the links I quickly checked were on a page with any page rank (one was on a PR1 page all the others no page rank). Therefore my gues is they had a single decent link from a PR 6 or 7 site and lost it.

Perhaps you may analysis any errors found in google webmaster. I did facing the same problem for my site and encounter there are several errors found in webmaster, eg bad links in website. I then fine tune it accordingly and finally PR been increase.

I don't see much back links they have in google to justify pr 5, no dmoz listing as well right ?... Is your webmaster tools still showing 2-3000 backlinks ?

Trading links with link trade only sites might get into trouble.

i have also lost my site PR.... in last pr updation

Check you website for duplicate content.. as i can see you have duplicate contenct.. / is the same with /index.php and with /index.php?home

have you got other parked domains??

Use 301 redirect

Agreed.

Would check webmasters for errors, run Xenu to check for various errors including timeout, 301, broken links, etc.

I vote for this answer as well. My company site had PR4 and I sold my PR6 site that linked back to my company site. My company site PR dropped to 0 the first update following the drop and then went back to PR4 the next update. So maybe wait and see if their PR comes back.

I didn't get this. What's cannonical error? How is the PR divided? can someone tell me more about this?

Read the last link beneath my sig' (Canonicalization Solutions).

@all: I removed a couple of pointless posts (repeating advice/opinions already given) and the thread has been hijacked twice now...
The O/P has been answered and is quite old now too... so I'm closing the thread to prevent further pointless posts.