Website dropped from PR3 back to PR1..

Kent Brockman

As the title says my website has dropped from being a PR3 and now is a PR1.

TBH we don't watch it that closely as we do get plenty of orders thru the website via direct traffic, and people are finding us via Google (according to the analytics).
We have a really active Facebook which also results in many sales and we use it (and Twitter) to drive visitors to the website. Obviously would prefer a higher PR and like to know why it dropped.
Website is Wordpress and we are using an SEO plugin.

Any ideas/tips/suggestions welcomed thanks.

TsuDhoNimh

We haven't got a whole lot of information there to go with, so I'll mention a few of the common issues that might be at play and see if we can narrow down the issue a little....

Have you changed the site recently? (by recently, I mean at any point between it being a PR3 and you noticing the drop to PR1)

Did you make any changes in the site architecture/URL structure/SEO tool you use or any other technical changes to the site between the changes in PR?

Do you monitor your backlinks and did you lose any authoritative backlinks? (losing a single valuable backlink could alone account for a drop like that)


Assuming you haven't made any onpage changes that might account for it, the most common cause of a PR drop like that is selling links.

On the off chance, I have to ask, have you/do you sell links on the site?

If not, there is still the potential that the 'links' page you have is potentially causing you to be flagged incorrectly for doing so (I'm assuming the 'links' page would be the most relevant/questionable, but do a search of your site for all external links [something like xenu link sleuth might help] on the off chance someone might have done something more questionable elsewhere on the site), so might be worth considering the removal of it and then submitting a reconsideration request to Google if you can't identify any other reason for a drop.

(That's assuming that you've had a drop in traffic to go with the drop in PR, which isn't immediately obvious from your post. If you haven't noticed a drop in traffic and have seen continued and steady growth in your search engine referrals over time, it could be a slight glitch on Google's end [even they have them from time to time] and I'd suggest ignoring it for a little time. Even accessing data on a different data centre has been known to throw up quirks like this from time to time)

Kent Brockman wrote: »

TBH we don't watch it that closely as we do get plenty of orders thru the website via direct traffic, and people are finding us via Google (according to the analytics).

An aside as far as this post goes...

I'd imagine you wouldn't get a huge amount of direct traffic with a name that contains a figure in place of a word (I had to double check the URL when making this point, but had just been on your homepage seconds before), unless you had just carried out an offline marketing push or attended a trade show.

Much of this 'direct' traffic could very well be (would be my assumption) referrals from social media platforms where the user isn't using the web interface.
e.g. If I'm accessing Facebook via a client other than a web browser, when I click on a referral link I won't be passing a HTTP referer header and will show up in your analytics data as 'direct traffic' instead of as a Facebook referral.

You can solve that by using campaign tracking parameters for your links on social platforms, but just wanted to mention it as an FYI.

Kent Brockman

Thanks a mil for that.

Yes we had our site with WIX then we built a totally new e-commerce website using Wordpress. Approx 6mths ago.
Noticed a drop from PR3 to PR2 shortly after that, though we were advised that a WP site was easier to get a higher rank.

All the links on the links page are genuine (don't have very many though) and are friends /contacts made thru FB and trade shows and are related to our area.
We did submit our url +details to lots of FREE web directories when we set up (Hotfrog, yalwa, Mytown, Browse Ireland and any others we could find, about 30 in total) and am wondering if this is now having a negative effect due to Google changes?

We are getting a lot more hits than before, Stats are not great but heading in the right direction. Used to get approx 300 a month with old site and getting around 1000 visitors per month with new WP site.
We attend lots of Small Baby fairs/local events/Display in Shopping centres and hand out lots of flyers, which probably accounts for a lot of our traffic.

If it is due to the completely new site (which seems likely) I wonder how long it will take or what we can do to improve rankings?

Thanks again fr your advice.

jmcc

Kent Brockman wrote: »

Yes we had our site with WIX then we built a totally new e-commerce website using Wordpress.

From what I remember, WIX produces Flash websites with very little plain text content. Moving to a WP based site would be a significant change. The IP address of the site would also have changed (and perhaps the nameservers/DNS). Did anything in the WHOIS/ownership record of the site change around this time?

We did submit our url +details to lots of FREE web directories when we set up (Hotfrog, yalwa, Mytown, Browse Ireland and any others we could find, about 30 in total) and am wondering if this is now having a negative effect due to Google changes?

Where these links all submitted around the same time and did they go live (added to these directories) around the same time so that it would appear to be a spike in the number of inbound links that the site was acquiring?

Regards...jmcc

Shzm

Why do you want a higher PR?

Your PR does not affect your rankings. Unless you've dropped in rankings recently (if you had any in the first place), stop worrying about it. PR is more to do with the strength/PR of the backlinks pointing towards you than anything else.

Btw, not sure why you have a 'links' page pointing to potential competitors. Surely you'd rather visitors stayed on your website instead of giving them an easy way to click out to somewhere else?

Also, consider naming your products properly. At the moment you have this: http://www.prints4gifts.com/products-page/silly-bibs/p4g-frog-bib/ , where P4G-FROG-BIB is the title of the product. Consider naming it appropriately - i.e 'Silly Frog Bib' or whatever. It will help somewhat with searches, and also help people in remembering what the name of that product was that they saw on that website a couple of days ago...

cormee

I agree with Shzm, don't be too concerned about PageRank, it's your traffic and position on SERP that count.

Another possible reason for a drop in rankings could be Google demoting the value of outbound links from a certain page, best way to explain is by means of an example - I had a link from Apple's app directory to one of my sites, the directory page had a rank of 5 so my site, completely undeservedly, inherited a rank of 4, as did the dozens of other sites that were linked from that page. Someone at Google realised what was happening and all of a sudden my site was demoted to a much more realistic PR of 1 (which made absolutely no difference to traffic.)