PR dropped from 3 to 0\. Why?

[salvyy]

Hi,

I have an important question and I hope you'll be able to help me find the answer. My site http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com had a PR of 3 (three). Then, I had it restructured to make it look more appealing in order to increase the conversion rate. The problem is that after it was redesigned, the PR dropped all of a sudden from 3 to 0. This is really bad, as it took me over three years to reach that point. Could you please analyze the site and find out what happened? I used SEOMOZ's research tools to try to understand and noticed the following message"

"Accessible to Engines Easy fix Crawl status Status Code: 200 meta-robots: noindex, follow meta-refresh: None X-Robots: None Explanation Pages that can't be crawled or indexed have no opportunity to rank in the results. Before tweaking keyword targeting or leveraging other optimization techniques, it's essential to make sure this page is accessible. Recommendation Ensure the URL returns the HTTP code 200 and is not blocked with robots.txt, meta robots or x-robots protocol (and does not meta refresh to another URL)".

Basically, the message said that the search engines cannot access the homepage (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com). May this be the reason why the PR dropped? What do I have to do to solve this problem? Is there a chance I can reach a PR of 3 again?

Thank you very much for your help. It'd be great if you could help my site regain its SEO strength.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi,

As you noted, the noindex meta tag is present on the page. This tells the search engines to completely remove it from their index. You want this to tag to be on pages you want removed/excluded from the search engines, certainly not on your homepage if you care about your PR.

As you can see here, your site is no longer cached in Google - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Awww.pokeronlineitalia.com. Your blog, on the other hand, which has the meta robots tag of "index,follow", is still in the cache of Google - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Awww.pokeronlineitalia.com%2Fblog

If you want search engine traffic, you need to remove this tag immediately and wait for Google to come and crawl the site. You may want to build some links into the site and/or share it over various social networks like Google+ and Twitter to speed up the indexation process.

This is most probably why the page has no PR - it's not indexed in Google.

[MassivePrime]

Have you rebuilt it on Wordpress?

[salvyy]

My friend,

I've forwarded your answer to the person who redesigned the site. I hope she'll solve the problem. I wish I could do it myself, but I just do not know what to do.  How do I remove that horrible "noindex meta tag" from the homepage?

Thank you and all the best.

• Sal