My Google PR is Decreasing HELP!

[MyNet]

We have just started in on an SEO campaign after a year or so break from engaging in active SEO efforts.  Our rankings and organic traffic seems to be increasing but we just dropped from a PR 5 to a PR 4 after being a PR 5 for probably a couple years.  We are not doing anything black hat or sketchy and try hard to make sure all of our links are relevant and quality links.  Does anyone know why this might have happened or if it is an indication of anything?

[Trupanion]

Besides PR (not really for SEO purposes) how do you track the site.  Are you utilizing http://www.opensiteexplorer.org ?  How are your numbers there going.  Google's PR isn't really a good number to use since it is only updated about every 6 months.  Focus on SEOmoz's tools for more accurate reporting.

[MyNet]

Well opensiteexplorer does not show historical data, so I have no way to see how we are doing compared to previous months to tell if we are increasing or not.  The only way I have to track our success is just by a handful of primary keywords I have entered into SEOmoz's tracking tool as well as checking those words in Google's webmaster tools.  In addition to that I can just look at Google analytics to see if our organic visits are increasing.  Do you know of a better way to track this information?

[Trupanion]

I didn't know if you export OSE's data for tracking purposes.  Every time SEOmoz has an update, I download all the info into an Excel spreadsheet to track monthly.

[EGOL]

PR is indexed based upon the total number of links on the web - something like the inflation index of money in reverse.

So, if your site gains links at a slower rate than the web in general your PR will go down... this can also happen if you lost links or the people who link to you have lost links.

[Trupanion]

Great information.

[Jinx14678]

Hi,

Last weekend (Or the one before that, they run together) Google did a PR update. Google even took a hit from a PR 10 to PR 9

Keep tracking your campaign and traffic for anomalies, if you see a unexplained decline, then worry, otherwise i would just keep focusing on creating quality content, gaining quality links and making sure your site is free of "spammy" SEO techniques and duplicate content.

[MyNet]

Oh ok.  Are you downloading all the links (up to 10,000 links) for your site and your three competitors, or do you just create a spreadsheet and keep up with the total number of links?

[Trupanion]

I track the "Full List of Link Metrics" on me and my top 10 competitors monthly.  And I also keep track of the "Anchor Text Distribution" and track link to root ration.  (Search SEOmoz for some good info on that)

[EGOL]

Amazing!   lol