PR DROPPED! More linkbacks than ever

My page rank was at 3 for nearly a year, and then a couple months back it dropped to a 2. I have more back links than ever, and Google has like 40,000 indexed URLs. I can't figure out why this happened. I have ten times as much traffic as this time last year.

The only change that occured around the time that this happened was I purchased a competitotrs URL DodgeBoard.com "Dodge City On The Net" and forwarded it to my URL DodgeBoard.com "Dodge City On The Net" It's a permanant redirect. I also redid my navbar with drop down menus.



Is Google penalizing me for dupe content?

What could have happened?

Well, It's been two years now. I have more links to my site than ever.

Still, my page rank is only a 2. I want my site to come up high on the search for "Dodge City" yet it doesn't. There are sites with far less links and very little traffic coming up before mine. I am on like page 10 or something.

I'm sorry guys, but I am not impressed anymore with vBSEO.

I'm thinking of ditching it.

Hello,

How are you targeting that (admittedly, very difficult to rank for) phrase?

Taking a look at your site, and the SERPs, I notice that many of the non-massive (not weather.gov or wikipedia) sites have the phrase in their domain name, and in their page titles.

Your site, I see it repeated a few times on the CMS, but not in the page titles or other places.

Well How would I go about adding it to the page title without it showing up here (see attachment) as well?

I tried it once and it made the navigation line too long.

Page Rank is a completely useless figure and should simply be ignored as a metric, period. 0, 10, 2, or 4, traffic is traffic.

Removing vbseo would start you all over from day 1.


A quick look in the serps, the one thing that nearly every site ranking above you has that you don't is "KS" in the title.

You also have:

There is 1 open event in the Betting section.

showing. and a link to it in the footer, Dodge City DodgeBoard.com - Casino
You may be getting slammed for being a gambling site instead of a city board with that one keyword. I would suggest disabling that mod/link from showing for guests.



see also:
[How To] Move CSS to file system

I made the changes you suggested over a month ago...still no change. Searching for "Dodge City" puts me on page 11 or 12 of Google. Also, of 160,000 urls submitted to Google, only about a third are indexed. Sites with very little to do with Dodge City are coming up on page 1. Any other suggestions?

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

A quick look in the serps, the one thing that nearly every site ranking above you has that you don't is "KS" in the title.

I'm still seeing this as the biggest issue. Everyone on page 1 and 2 has "KS" in their titles. you do not.

I would replace "dodgeboard.com" in your title with "KS"

How can I do that without it also changing the name of the forums? - see post 4

The easiest thing would be to hardcode "KS" into the <title> block on the templates (forumhome, forumsdisplay and showthread). Alternatively, you can over-ride the default variable, x_powered_by to include "KS" instead of the old - powered by vBulletin.

Thanks, done. Edited the templates.

If smaller sites that are getting less traffic than you are ranking better for the keyword...then that keyword must not be producing much traffic. I would do some keyword research and see what other terms you can shoot for that may not have as much competition.