PageRank Dropped?

[EZWatchPro]

The Symptoms

About a year ago, our site EZWatch-Security-Cameras.com had a PageRank of 5.

Several months ago it sunk to a 4 and we were a little worried, but it wasn't anything to really sweat over.

At the end of january we noticed it had dropped again to a PR3, again we were a little more worried.

When the farmer update hit we suddenly dropped to a PR1 but our traffic wasn't seriously affected, and in march most of the pages regained their PageRank.

I noticed this morning that our homepage rank has once again dropped to a PR1. I am waiting to see if there has been any significant drop in traffic, but I haven't spotted anything that stands out significant, aside from an increase in the average cost for our paid search account of about 5%.

The Problems We've Spotted

Keep in mind that our current website is fairly old (2005) and we are ready to launch a new one.

Our current website is running on X-Cart, and we have a few modules added on.

Problem 1 - One such module handles a custom kit builder, this area has not been restricted by crawlers and it could be generating a large amount of needless page crawls.

Problem 2 - Another module allows "SEO friendly URL's" according to the developer, but what actually happens is a visitor could type in any-url-they-like-for-product-id**-p-11111.html**, where the underlined section is any character string (or lack of), followed by either a product or category indicator and the id for said item. This causes a massive amount of virtual page duplications, and the module is encrypted so we aren't able to modify it to include rel="canonical" tags. Obviously this causes massive amounts of seemingly duplicate content.

Problem 3 - In addition to the regular URL duplication, we also recently acquired the domain EZWatch.com (our brand name, easier to remember). That domain name responds with the content from our regular website, and it will be the primary domain name when we change shopping carts. With the second domain name the content could also be considered a duplication.

The Solutions We're Working On

The website we use was designed in 2005, and we believe that it's reached the end of its useful life. Over the past several months we have been working on an entirely new shopping cart platform, designed from the ground up to be more efficient operationally-speaking, and to provide more SEO control. The new site will be ready to launch within days, and we will start using the new Domain name at the same time.

We are planning on doing page-to-page301 redirects for all pages with at least 1 visit within the past 180+ days, according to our Google Analytics reports.

We are also including rel="canonical" on all pages.

We will also be restricting dynamic sections of our website via the robots.txt file.

So What More Can We Do?

With your collective SEO experience, what other factors could also be contributing to this decline?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, you have pretty much answered this question yourself - "we suddenly dropped to a PR1 but our traffic wasn't seriously affected". If this is the case, then, I would not worry about the toolbar page rank.

Also, you have a raft of other problems, but you seem to have a handle on those. I would spend your time constructively focusing on getting your new site up and running and resolving all these duplication issues and not spend another minute worrying about your loss of page rank.