Two Reasons Why Google May Kick You Down
One reason why Google lowers the page rank or PR of a blog could be that the blog loads too slowly or slower than it should. My blog was loading slowly yesterday due to a banner that was holding it up. The banner changed servers and things were not done correctly. It was fixed within 24 hours but the damage has been done as the bots were just visiting at that time.
Another reason for Google to lower the PR could be that the frequency of posting new content is not high enough in Google’s eyes. This, however, is likely a much smaller reason for being kicked down. I say this because I’ve seen blogs with no new posts and very little activity for over 6 months that have retained their rank.
Today my blog’s PR was lowered from PR4 to PR3 and also 4 of my blog’s pages have been lowered from rank 2 to rank 1. This has happened after about a year of rank stability and for no other reason, except the above stated 2, that I can surmise.
It needs to be said that whatever reasons Google has for doing this, they could be entirely different from what anyone may think or suppose. It is not at all clear what Google really wants and values in spite the hints they give so grudgingly.
I’ve seen blogs, pages and videos with a lot of reader and viewer interaction and high perceived value that have much lower rank than blogs, pages and videos that hardly anybody reads, watches and comments on.
What Makes Sense and What Doesn’t About Google
Observing things like that, including the way Google is changing YouTube (read my previous post about new YouTube), it seems that the way Google acts sometimes, it makes no sense at all. Still, it makes sense to be on the good side of Google. Being on the good side of Google means doing things honestly without trying to fool it even if it doesn’t pay off.
When Google implies that a slow loading site may be punished, it pays off to make it load fast. When Google implies, and they never seem to make things 100% clear, that a site with a lot of incoming links will be rewarded by sitting high in Google search engine results and will receive a higher PR rank it doesn’t necessarily pay off not to try to build links faster than would be natural. But in the long run nobody can outsmart Google which is why it’s much better not to build links artificially.
That being said, it still surprises me how honest links tend to disappear over time. From 32 links that were on my blog in the summer of last year, as per Google, there were later only 11, then 3 and soon perhaps there will be none left. The number of indexed pages, on the other hand, has risen disproportionately.
Since Google has the biggest slice of the pie, people tend to focus most of their attention on Google. But how about the other search engines, namely Yahoo and Bing, are they behaving more rationally? Yes and no.
From what I could observe over the years, their search results seem to be more stable. When it comes to links and indexed pages and their stability they have recently, in the last 6 months or so, changed dramatically for the worse.
What’s your take on this, do you care about your blog’s PR (I mean page rank not public relations) links and what Google does?
Please comment, then tweet it, bookmark it, facebook and google+ it. Yes, facebook it and google+ it are now verbs, calls to action.
After having done that watch this cute sleeping cat familly with a kitten on guard.
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Authored by Vance Sova
Filed under: SEO Strategy, Blogging Tips
When you earn a ranking that puts your page in the top 10 for its category, people immediately find your articles in the searches they do using Web browsers. Although tricks abound for increasing page rank, the best sites do so by putting quality content first.
Vance Reply:
August 2nd, 2012 at 7:01 pm
Hi Natalie,
Thanks for the comment although I wish you’d commented more exactly about what I wrote rather than expressing generalities and platitudes.
Cheers,
Vance
You’re so right Vance, Google is like the big daddy that we all want to please. It judges websites on over 200 factors (site loading time being just one of them), and none of us remotely understands their algorithms. Sometimes how Google comes up with site authority and PR makes no sense (as you mentioned about non-active blogs retaining PR while the active ones falling down the ranks), but it’s only good for us to follow guidelines laid by them. Though there is no guarantee when you could be penalized for being too good and over-doing what Google asks (I’m hinting at over optimization penalty that Google applied in it’s recent updates).
Samaira Jonathon´s last blog post ..Bluehost 3.95
Highly descriptive post, I liked that a lot.
Will there be a part 2?
Vance Reply:
August 7th, 2012 at 10:32 am
Hi Mckenzie,
It looks like you are after links. I have removed comment luv and the next time you produce a comment like this it will go to trash right away. Your comment is a good example of a worthless spam comment. Will there be a part two? You very likely didn’t bother reading this post at all. If you did comment about it.
Definitely if your blog is loading slowly then nobody will visit your blog,its a big drawback.first we must recover this issue.
Vance Reply:
August 7th, 2012 at 10:26 am
Hi Katherin,
It looks like you just read the first line of this post. Your comment kind of indicates that. I should have put it in the trash but I decided to give you a warning and to everyone else who is after a link using useless comments. Comments like this one are useless and will be trashed. If you can’t add anything of value don’t bother to comment.
Cheers,
Vance
Speed is definitely important, google is starting to take in things that would drive users away and penalize the sites.
Vance Reply:
August 10th, 2012 at 11:14 am
After less than 24 hours of the site being slow that kind of punishment would seem too harsh, wouldn’t it?
Interesting post for sure. I have a VPS and I still get a hit as far as I can tell from my tools at SEO profiler. There are so many updates at Google its hard to keep track. I have a trustworthy site and I got dropped from a PR4 to a PR2! I have a business website so I never thought about blogging though. Your site seems fairly fast though, Vance… What type of server is yours on?
Cheers
Robert Rupp
Robert Rupp Consulting
Vance Reply:
August 10th, 2012 at 11:09 am
Hi Robert,
Sorry to hear that your PR was dropped that much. I’m noticing now more often that the PR is reflecting something that often makes little sense as I pointed out in my post. For that reason it’s perhaps a time to stop worrying about it too much. It is still important but the page rank and the way it’s arrived at and what it reflects makes less sense than ever.
As for the server, I use an outside server of a reputable company that is not particularly special. I don’t really think that it matters that much which particular company you use. If you really want to know the name, reply to this.
Vance
Thanks for the article Vance. I am attempting to start up a proofreading website myself but I didn’t realise how much SEO was required. This is very helpful. I never knew what PR was before this.
Vance Reply:
August 10th, 2012 at 10:58 am
Hi Francis,
I’m glad you liked it.
Hi, I’m a newbie, but I´ve heard a lot about the Google Panda update, from speaking to people, they are confused as to what they did or didn’t do correctly, there hasn’t been clear information. Hopefully some of the other search engines will jump on the band wagon and give Google some healthy competition.
Vance Reply:
August 10th, 2012 at 2:44 pm
Hi,
With your url being play dot Google dot com store apps it’s a certainly interesting comment to make. Google has at least 70% of the search engine traffic so healthy competition is long gone. It would be better if they behaved according to their motto they at least used to have if they don’t have it anymore, which said: do no evil.
Hey Vance-
First off… the video of the kittens almost put me to sleep (in a good way). Kept expecting the kitten to attack you 🙂 Regarding Google showing your links going down — according to my SEOquake toolbar, you have 1,292 links to your domain. It does seem odd that your number of index pages goes up while the links go down. From my perspective, the PR is important — as it helps my pages get indexed. If my pages are getting indexed then I am happy. One variable you didn’t speak about though — what happened to your Google Search traffic during this time?
John
John Rockwell´s last blog post ..Data Dashboard
Vance Reply:
August 16th, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Hey John,
Thanks for the nice comment and for watching the kitten video. I’m glad to read a comment that doesn’t dismiss the importance of PR and that doesn’t blame me for doing something wrong. I had to delete some comments that were too ignorant and off the subject and some a total spam. My search traffic didn’t suffer that much if at all from what I can see. Maybe 10% to 15% but it’s too short a time to be sure. Traffic as you know is not completely constant and there are peaks and vallies.
Cheers,
Vance
The reasons or we can call criteria changes almost everyday in google algorithms. Now why does google do this? The main reason being to keep the web clean and secured. If given an opportunity google might as well ban all the fake sites and penalize them but the scripts from these sites prevents google to enter the sites.
Lowering the PR is a very big thing for regular bloggers as their source of income (advertisers and advertisements) depends on it. So to eliminate this bloggers can keep a routine of posting blogs per day, not over-optimizing the content on the site, not linking too many websites in the same post.
Vance Reply:
August 16th, 2012 at 12:17 pm
Hi Chetan,
Legitimate, no fake, no cheating sites get their page rank changed too. The frequency of posting is no guarantee that the page rank won’t be degraded by Google either. Thanks for your input.
Vance
Google Page Rank for a particular page is directly proportional to the number of links that point to it. However, these links are not all given the same weight. Google claims that some links are more important because they originate on pages that are themselves considered important. So, out of two links from two different pages, a link coming from a page with a higher Page Rank will be given more weight in the algorithm. The more links with high PR to your site, the higher PR
Vance Reply:
August 16th, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Hi Anna,
Your comment is interesting in that you seem to think that you know exactly how Google arrives at page rank. While some of what you say may be true, based on my observation there is a lot more complex formula for how Google ranks sites and pages. On top of that they do revise things periodically and the same site and pages change rank up and down for no apparent reason.
Vance
I have stopped paying so much attention to PR – it makes no difference to rankings and it is really worthless now. I am paying more attention to my Domain authority in SEOmoz as a lot of advertisers are now taking that into factor – anything 50 and above is considered to reflect that you are a worthwhile leader in your niche.
As for Google, I would love to comment but can not without writing a full sentence about them that would only contain swear words. Google has lost a lot of respect and hardly anyone I know uses the term “Google is king”
Vance Reply:
August 16th, 2012 at 12:04 pm
Hi Natalie,
Thank you for your comment. Interesting perspective. I still think that PR is important even though perhaps not as much as it used to be in the eyes of many people. Google may not be loved or even liked but they still do commend respect because of their share of the market if for no other reason.
Cheers,
Vance
Hey Vance,
I think PR is important, but probably not as important as many people consider it. Obviously a PR 0 site can outrank a PR 4 site (sometimes easily) so PR definitely isn’t the “end all” of ranking.
I’ve always heard that PR is mostly related to the links you have pointing to your site and not as much to your content. There seems to be evidence of this since there are a lot of sites with very few pages that have high PR and plenty of sites with tons of content that can never seem to get past PR 2.
As with everything else, the way Google adjusts and determines PR is likely always changing.
Derek Maak @ Text Your Ex Back´s last blog post ..Text Your Ex Back Review Of Michael Fiore’s TXB 2.0 Texting Guide
Vance Reply:
August 18th, 2012 at 3:53 pm
Hi Derek,
PR is still important but perhaps not as much as it once was. When it comes to links, recently it appears that Google itself doesn’t value most of them. And I know of plenty of pages with links and low PR and vice versa. That’s why it increasingly seems that what Google does doesn’t make sense.
Thanks for the input.
Hi,
Interesting post – as a fairly new marketer I thought its was all about links? It was then bought to my attention that only high quality links really have any power with your overall PR. One high quality page rank is worth way more than hundreds of poor low quality ones….
Regards,
John
Vance Reply:
August 30th, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Hi John,
Thank you for the comment. It’s now even questionable if any links in the traditional sense are valued by Google anymore.
It’s very problematic when your site loads so slowly, Bots may able to interpret that issue as an error page. So having a light and fast loading website is very important aspect in SEO game.
Vance Reply:
August 30th, 2012 at 7:47 pm
Hi Lesley,
As I mentioned in the post it was only for a day or less that the site was slow. I am fully aware that speed of loading is an important factor.
Google is fighting many spammers and in its quest of having a clean web it enforces rules that unfortunately also hit the honest folk. I guess this might be one of the reasons why some of your links might be disappearing?
Anyway, in regards to your main topic: lowering the PR of a blog and its pages I want to add the following. I read a blog couple of days ago. The blog owner made an experiment. She quit posting on her blog on purpose for a long time. The result? Google dropped her PR from PR5 to PR4 and her Alexa rank got really bad. The conclusion is that Google might expect a lot of unique content as well for a good PR.
Julius @RoundNews´s last blog post ..Dinosaur footprint found in NASA’s Maryland campus
Vance Reply:
August 30th, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Hi Julius,
Thanks for commenting. You mention valid points which I’m aware of. However, they don’t all and always hold true. For the PR to drop due to not posting for a long time, as I wrote in the post I’ve seen sites with no new content for up to 6 months with no change in their PR. I guess it depends. The Alexa rank is coming down with no new content because the regular readers stop visiting after a while when they see no new content. However Alexa is not a very reliable indicator of the real number of visitors in my experience. Google loves new and unique content because it feeds on it.
I enjoyed your comment and hope to read another one from you soon.
Cheer,
Vance
I have already read the most of the articles on the web about the Penguin update, and I have some really bad experiences in my statistics and rankings, the only which haven’t been told why it happens to personal sites, too. I can understand that there are a lot of sites just because of SEO reasons, and Google wants to serve their clients without spamming and misleading the search engines. But they haven’t done a precise job, it will affect negative in the future.
Interesting text, I have already read the most of the articles on the web about the Penguin update, and I have some really bad experiences in my statistics and rankings, the only which haven’t been told why it happens to personal sites, too. I can understand that there are a lot of sites just because of SEO reasons, and Google wants to serve their clients without spamming and misleading the search engines. But they haven’t done a precise job, it will affect negative in the future.
Helga@fogpótlás fogbeültetéssel´s last blog post ..A fogbeültetés alkalmazása
Vance Reply:
August 30th, 2012 at 8:02 pm
Hi Helga,
Trying to understand Google is always a guessing game. They want to provide good search results to their customers and they don’t intentionally want to hurt legitimate sites. But they don’t worry too much if they do.
Thanks for the comment. Read my latest post about what may be the next Google move.
Cheers,
Vance
I agree with the idea that PR is not the definitive marker to determine the ranking of your site. I also believe that “nofollow” does not take away the value of a backlink which is in a similar idealism. Great post! Thanks!
Hey, Thanks for the article Vance. I am attempting to start up a proofreading website myself but I didn’t realise how much SEO was required. This is very helpful. I never knew what PR was before this
Well same problem here with decreasing PR. My site loads faster than before but still no increase in my PR. This year May my site stepped down from 4 to 3 and after one month it become 2. In the beginning I thought it could be my loading speed or my bad links. So I sorted it out but the result doesn’t changed at all. I totally don’t understand what Google wants or neither do they. I think it is time to hire a professional SEO consultant for my site. Thanks for your tips anyway.
Vance Reply:
September 5th, 2012 at 12:17 pm
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for commenting. I’m not sure if professional SEO consultants will be able to help you that much The rules of the game are changing all the time and unless you want to hire an SEO consultant permanently, whatever they do for you now may not be of lasting value. It may be better for you to provide the best value you can on your site and learn as much about what Google wants and make sure you don’t do anything that upsets them.
P.S. Thanks for the two emails. I found 2 of your comments in the spam folder and unspammed them. However only one of them is now showing up, which is the one I’m responding to. Please write another comment or repost the one you submitted already if you have a copy of it. I suggest that you keep a copy of your comments until they are approved. If your comment is found I’ll be sure to approve it as long as it’s a good comment as yours tend to be.
Cheers,
Vance
Hi,
I believe that Google Page Rank depends on back-linking, Someone increase the number of back-links and get the High PR but Google also checks the content of website/blog. if it has not quality then penalize this.
your article is very interesting and informative.
Thanks for sharing this!
Vance Reply:
September 5th, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Hi Ravi,
Links may not be valued as much as before if at all. Please read my post “Google’s Next Earth Shattering Update” which I wrote after this one.
Vance.
RaviSingh Reply:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:15 pm
Sure Vance, I will definitely read that post. Yes Now days Google doesn’t pay much attention on the number of backlinks. It also checks the quality of the backlinks, content on the site and how frequently you update your site with unique contents while maintaining the keyword density.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll remove a few banners and some plugins that makes my blog load slow. I don’t want my PR to go down. It’s been 4 months and I got PR3. This is really a big help. Thank you!
Vance Reply:
September 5th, 2012 at 11:11 am
Hi Jason,
Thanks for the comment. It’s great to know that you find the post helpful.
My web hosting company uses page speed optimization which was developed by Google. It basically makes your web pages load fast using their page speed tools.
Nice article. My most recent website got hit by the Penguin update in May and I still haven’t recovered from the damage. My PR remains the same despite me being kicked to page 50 in the rankings. Google are a mystery sometimes. I guess the only way to succeed now is to play fair with them and to kick out black hat SEO techniques.
Whenever Google decides to make a change to any of it’s algorithms, it is always a frightening thing… when the change has a positive impact on you, it is very subtle, but when it is negative, it has such a detrimental effect on sites and all hell nearly breaks loose! I personally don’t really give page rank that much attention – although you can’t help but use it as some kind of indicator to the quality and amount of traffic being directed; even though, as you pointed out, this isn’t true in quite a few cases. Thanks for your post and it’s depth and nice touch with the cat video at the end 😛
Cats just don’t know how much power they have on the internet!
Vance Reply:
September 28th, 2012 at 10:49 pm
Hi Darren,
Thanks for your comment. I have yet to hear of any significant positive impact of any changes Google makes on anyone’s site. Everybody seems to be saying they don’t give much importance to page rank. It could be true when they think about it but on a subconscious level I think that we all react to it quite strongly. It still does matter. A good indication of how random and inconsistent the page rank can be are some of my YouTUbe videos. Without any qualitative difference in their content and description and often even the subject, one video can rank two levels or even three levels higher over another. If the robots are so smart, when given virtually same quality of content, they should give it virtually identical ranking. But that is frequently not so.
Thanks for mentioning my cat video on this page. I hope you enjoyed it.
Cheers,
Vance
just concentrate on your content and google will never do that
Hi there, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was
just curious if you get a lot of spam responses?
If so how do you protect against it, any plugin or anything you can recommend?
I get so much lately it’s driving me mad so any help is very much appreciated.
Vance Reply:
November 3rd, 2012 at 10:04 am
Hi Quinn,
Have you heard or know of Akismet? It catches most of the spam.
Vance
I thought its was all about links? It was then bought to my attention that only high quality links really have any power with your overall PR
Thanks for the informative post..
i have experience this before, google didn’t just lower my blog’s pr, they kicked my blog, which already have 3000-5000 views/day, all from google search too.
Now i have to begin building my new blogs from scratch, but i am determined to do so..
Thanks again.