Pagerank and dropping down on google....

It's been a while since I last checked, a few month maybe, but I have gone from a pagerank of 5 to now a 4. I also do a search for "sim racing" and my site (Sim Racing Design - Your source for Sim Racing add-ons) is now on the second page at the bottom, I used to be on the first page when I did a search.

What gives? I have my sitemap going to both Google and Yahoo, and by now I know both search engines are indexing my new urls from vBSEO.

What else is there for me to do? My traffic is at an all time high recently, I know for a fact my site is getting backlinks. This makes no sense to me.

Some ideas or some help would be greatly appreciated to get me back where I once was.

Pagerank dropped a point for a large amount of websites in this last update. This has been widely discussed at several websites, so evidently google has made a chance somewhere.

What about the pagerank of your individual forums? Are you noticing a change there?

You mention that you traffic is at an all time high. I would imagine this is a good thing, unless I am reading what you are saying wrong.

Something to think about: vBSEO does not really work toward getting your site better rankings for specific keywords. It works towards making each of your threads more valuable and getting them ranked higher, therefore increasing your search engine referrals for a wider variety of keywords. In other words, instead of depending on traffic from specific keywords, you will ultimately get more traffic from search engine via a wider variety of keywords.

I will make a suggestion to you regarding adsense.

Remove those images by your ads before someone from google sees it, and before someone reports you. This is 100% against google's TOS and they will kick you out of the program immediately if they see it.

Originally Posted by Mike

Pagerank dropped a point for a large amount of websites in this last update. This has been widely discussed at several websites, so evidently google has made a chance somewhere.

What about the pagerank of your individual forums? Are you noticing a change there?

You mention that you traffic is at an all time high. I would imagine this is a good thing, unless I am reading what you are saying wrong.

Honestly, I never checked my individual forums before now. They are a 3. I am assuming before the change they were a 4? lol, don't know about that one.

And yes, the high traffic is a good thing

Originally Posted by Mike

I will make a suggestion to you regarding adsense.

Remove those images by your ads before someone from google sees it, and before someone reports you. This is 100% against google's TOS and they will kick you out of the program immediately if they see it.

Google has seen my site, and emailed me asking if I wanted to take part in there adsense program on how to maximize your revenue using my website as a reference.

I suppose I should remove them, I didn't know this was against their TOS.

Thanks for the info and help

Is it against their TOS if I put a border around the google ads and keep the images?

Originally Posted by moreilly

Is it against their TOS if I put a border around the google ads and keep the images?

Inside AdSense: Ad and image placement: a policy clarification

What if I place a space or a line between my images and my ads? Would that work?

No. If the ads and the images appear to be associated, inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads will not make the implementation compliant.

I would say it is a "fine" line. You may just want to send them a quick e-mail to ask them. But they will probably give you the customary standard response of read the TOS.

Thanks James, that pretty much sums it up. lol. I'll get them off now, I would hate to lose my google ads :(