Lost PageRank? Can You Get it Back?
Filed under: Google, Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Online Marketing, seo, Traffic, Web Sites
A question that’s often asked (nearly everywhere SEO is talked about it seems) is about PageRank and what to do if all of a sudden the awesome PageRank you just had yesterday – has tanked or worse yet, disappeared all-together.
If your PageRank has Dropped
First, determine what has really happened. If you had a PageRank of 5 yesterday and you all of a sudden have a PageRank of 1, all is not lost. This could actually mean a variety of things. One of them is that one of the sites linking to you has seen a significant drop in PageRank itself. Remember, when other sites link to you (and especially if they’re one way links), you get a portion of their PageRank passed on to you.
So if you had a site that had a PageRank of 7 linking to you, thus helping your own PageRank status, and they all of a sudden dropped to a 3 (as an example) then your PageRank will likely be affected.
Now consider this PageRank drop with not one site but with multiple sites. This would definiately have an adverse effect on your overall PageRank.
The first thing to do would be to check and see if there have been any changes to the PageRank of the sites linking to you. But first, you have to know who is linking to you.
One way to do this is with Yahoo’s site explorer tool. Enter in your domain name, click “inlinks” and then choose “except from this domain” from the drop-down list. This will show you all of the links pointing to your own site.
Visit these sites and be sure that none of them have been removed from Google’s index. (You can find this out by typing in the Google search box the following – site:thenameofthesite.com.) If nothing comes up, they’ve been removed from the index and this could be one of the causes of your drop in PageRank.
You can also use Google Analytics to see who is sending you traffic via the “Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites” link.
If Your PageRank is Gone
Ok, this is probably one of the worst-case scenarios. If you previously had a PageRank on your site, even if it was as little as a 1, and all of a sudden you look up at your trusty Google toolbar and notice that the PageRank of your web page is now gray, this can be a very significant issue.
The first thing to do is to first check that URL in Google and see if it’s still indexed. Just type in the Google search box site:yoursiteurl.com and see if something comes up. If it doesn’t, it means that you’ve probably been removed from Google’s index.
So what should you do?
Well, if this were to happen to you that means that Google felt that you were doing something illegal; or at least something against their webmaster guidelines.
So you first need to ask yourself a few questions.
- Did you use any kind of black-hat techniques on your site? Things such as cloaking, invisible text, redirection, etc. If so, this could likely be the reason.
- Were you selling links from your site? Likely that this could be the issue.
- Did you offer any downloads off of your site that could have contained malicious code?
There are many possible questions that you could ask yourself – and far too long of a list to post here; but the bottom line is that if you were doing something “illegal” in the search engines eyes, they probably found out about it and you are now feeling the reprucussions.
You can also check out Google’s business listing quality guidelines andGoogle’s webmaster guidelines to double-check to be sure you were following the rules.
If you have a Google webmaster account, log in and see if you have any messages from Google. If you’re lucky, they’ll have sent you a message telling you why your site was removed.
Whatever it is that they tell you, FIX THE ISSUE. Once you have the issue fixed, you’ll next need to submit a reinclusion request. Which could take a bit of time so be prepared to wait and ready to explain yourself.
This post is an excerpt from Bonehead Bits – The SEO Newsletter. To get your copy before the public does (for free), click here now and get signed up.
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One Comment on Lost PageRank? Can You Get it Back?
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John Of All Trades on
Wed, 7th Oct 2009 8:37 am
Thanks for the information, my site lost all traffic and hasn’t picked back up in over a week 
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and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
