SEO

I just noticed the PR3s and 4s are completely gone from all the pages of my site now except for the home page. How could that have happened? Could it be attributed solely to a server move? I didn't change anything except servers. I certainly didn't modify my settings with vBSEO.

During the preceding weeks of the move, I copied my site to a test domain, thefloorpro.net (the original site is thefloorpro.com). Could that short period of time have caused Google to penalize me?

Is there anything I can do about it?

Thanks,

Jim

So - you moved your forum from the .net to the .com for a few weeks, prior to re-launching back on the .com? Is that correct?

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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No. TheFloorPro.com has always been thefloorpro.com. It was hosted on 1and1.com until recently. During my research for a new host, I set a copy of the site up on thefloorpro.net - set up and taken down several times before I found Host Gator. Once I move the site to the new server, I took thefloorpro.net down. It was active a relatively short period of time. Certainly not long enough for me to have lost the page rank on so many of my pages - and not at all on my home page.

Thanks for any insight you might have, Joe.

Jim

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an eJM site:

Did your index page count drop? If they didn't fall out of the SERPs I see no reason why they should have lost PageRank.

Did thefloorpro.net get crawled while it was up for testing?

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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Sorry to bring this up again, but there has been some other discussions about lost page rank, so I thought this might be relevant again.

I let this dog lie for a while, thinking in a couple months my PR would return. This most recent PR update did bring a number of pages back from 0 to 1 - not much solace. My home page was the only page that didn't lose PR last August/September, but just recently it dropped from 4 down to 3.

My search for any search engine indexed pages of my test site, thefloorpro.NET came up with only one page in google. The tool I used didn't tell me what page it was, but I am confident that my use of the .NET site didn't hurt the ranking of thefloorpro.com.

But I'd still like to know what happened? I understand that my 4s and 3s (I had a lot of them) might have dropped anyway, but they dropped to zero last September for some reason. I have worked hard the last couple of months to improve the SEO considerably. I know it wasn't in time to have much, if any effect on Google's last update. It's still a big concern for me.

Would someone here on support staff be willing to have a look at my server, site and settings to see if there are any glaring problems? Maybe be able to tell me where the leak is?

Thanks,

Jim

It's quite possible that Google is adjusting the visible PageRank scale. They may have implemented a new algorithm that devaluates a certain category of incoming links for instance, that could result in single or multi-point reductions on some pages.

How is your traffic?

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
vBSEO 3.2.0 Launched - Maximum Overdrive for Your Web Traffic! Over 100 Instant SEO Optimizations

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6X Traffic - $1400 in One Day with vBSEO! Imagine What the vBSEO Patent Pending Technology Can Do For You.

I have heard talk about the PageRank scale, but I think something happened shortly after my server move last August. I had a lot of PR3's and 4's that went to zero when no one else was talking about any Google updates. The only page that held onto its rank was my home page at PR4.

Just in the last few days I saw PR changes in my site - a lot of the dropped to PR0 pages got PR1's and my home page fell back one to PR3.

Before the server move, I was using 1and1.com as my host. Their statistics, emailed to me every week, showed me well above 1,000 uniques per day for several months and then it climbed to over 2,000 per day (went as high as 2,500 one day) for a month or 2 before I moved.

After the move, I have several statistics reports to choose from on Host Gator: AWStats, Webalizer and some Last 300 Visitors thing I can't decipher. But they are showing me reports for tfpcom.enterprisejm.net, which is the folder thefloorpro.com is located in. I'm not sure if there would be a difference between that and the actual domain. I also have Google Analytics. I can give you 3 different sets of numbers and they all seem to be reporting differently.

I have no idea which is more accurate. If there is a better statistics package available somewhere, please let me know. Or maybe one I have can be customized.

One thing seems to be apparent: 1and1.com's statistics were not right. Even the differences in these 3 packages isn't that far off and my URL structure didn't change when I moved servers.

Needless to say, this is troubling - and certainly disappointing.

Thanks for any guidance or suggestions you might have.

Jim

there's PLENTY of better stats programs out there.... but they cost a pretty penny. Omniture is one of the leaders i think, but it's NOT cheap.


keep in mind that google uses js. anything without js enabled won't count.
server-level stats collect everything, including bot hits, which is why they are always higher than js-powered stat programs.


the best thing to do is to go into google analytics...

click traffic sources on the left nav
then click on google (organic) in the pane of top traffic (if its not your top ref, you might need to click on view all first)


i dropped from a pr5 to a pr2, and my traffic is constant from google across the board.

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I dropped PR too, and I've added a few thousand backlinks.. Google is just a mystery like that :(