My PR dropped by a point - Why?

[deuce1s]

My PageRank has been penalized by Google - dropping from PR3 to PR2.

I've done some research online and I see that the PR changed on June 27.

How can I find out if my site is being penalized - and what can I do about it?

I am improving my site internally as much as I can - will these factors help improve my PR directly, or is this a metric solely dependent on inbound links?

[RyanKent]

The PR you see on your toolbar is only updated by Google once every 3-4 months.

You should also know the PR score is actually a two-digit number, but you only see the first digit. If your PR was 30 you can lose a single link, or have a link devalued, and then your PR would drop to 29. What you would see on the toolbar is your rank drop from 3 to 2.

It is possible your site did something wrong. It is entirely possible your site has done everything just fine, and a site linking to you has been affected and that link was devalued. Continue your normal quality improvements and link building, and your site should bounce up again during the next update.

PS. Build your site with QUALITY links. The random directory links, paid links, etc are not quality links. Clearly those links don't add value to your site and even if they offered a boost to PR today, they will clearly be discovered at some point in the future and devalued.

[deuce1s]

That's very interesting.

However, we don't engage in any black-hat SEO - so no random directories, no paid links, nothing like that.

I want to point out 2 things:

1. I just changed the navigation system on my website. Originally the main menu displayed something like 60-70 internal links (through sub-menus etc). What I did to change this is categorize all of my pages, and then show different submenus for different categories. I understand this is a good move because it reduces the # of on page links (of course I 301 redirected all of the old URLs), correct?

2. We have a network for related websites (province/city specific) which contain a link back to our main site. These sites currently contain duplicate content (they were acquired this way). We will be changing this in the future. Also they are hosted on the same server. Nevertheless, they are different (though very related) to our main site. My question is, could having my entire network with its current (duplicate) content point back to our main site have a negative effect on my PR? Or would it have the opposite effect?

[KeriMorgret]

Building on what Ryan said, the PageRank reported in the toolbar is updated infrequently -- this last time it was six months since the previous update. Matt Cutts has said they don't worry about making sure what is pushed out to the toolbar is a perfect representation of the true PR of that page, either. And, the data you're looking at in the toolbar is already a few weeks old by the time it's pushed.

So, has anything important to your metrics changed? What does your organic traffic from Google look like for the past six months? Has that changed?

For the directories, I'm betting Ryan took your site and put it into Open Site Explorer, and spotted things like the General Garden Web directory. I also spotted links from similar sites that all have the same type of formatting and look and feel -- you might have a bit of a duplicate content problem going on as well. I see mortgagecalculatorcanada.com and canadianmortgagecalculators.net that look like they're virtually the same site.

[deuce1s]

Yes - we are aware of our duplicate content problem.

To establish our brand, we have applied the same template throughout our network. However, except for some minor things like titles, many of these pages contain the same content. It's something we know we have to change.

Is it a good idea to use the same template in all of these sites, if they all had different content? We want them to link back to our main site - but from an SEO perspective should they all appear to be distinct? Remember we want to establish our brand, we want Google to recognize our brand.

[RyanKent]

I absolutely agree with Keri on the points she raised. Some responses to your questions:

With respect to your navigation changes, it could have a positive or negative effect on your site depending on the changes. If you eliminated links to less popular areas of your site, that is a good thing. If you eliminated links to good content and now it takes users more clicks to open a page then more juice will be lost and the content could become too deep for indexing.

The links from your duplicate content sites shouldn't hurt your site, but if they share your same web host they don't help it either. It sounds like you are aware of your duplicate content issues and are working to correct the problem.

With respect to establishing a brand, I would suggest you really focus on making your main site stand out. A part of that is having a great looking site that is not just another template copy.

My favorite source of information on establishing a brand is: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-of-link-building  Since the webinar is titled "link building" many people miss it. I LOVE this video. Watch it, then watch it again. Take notes. It contains fantastic information for establishing a brand.