What happened to my PR?

[Marko Peric]

Since I don't use the google toolbar, I use a web app (http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php) to calculate my page rank. I noticed the other day that my site had suddenly gone to a PR of 0 when I checked it for www.dontmindme.com, but was still 4 for dontmindme.com. Previously it had been 5 either way. What could have caused this sudden drop? I've also found that when I search on google for link:www.dontmindme.com it doesn't find anything, even though there are a number of links out there. Have I done something to offend the google robots? I had recently linked to another rather unrelated site as a favour (his page rank has gone from 0 when I linked up to 3 by today), could that be the problem? Since I wasn't getting any traffic from his site, I removed that link in a panic today.
Anyone have any advice?

[rainbore]

Your site seems to have fallen victim to the Dreaded Missing WWW Syndrome. Somewhere out there in cyberspace is at least one link pointing to your site with the URL http://dontmindme.com instead of http://www.dontmindme.com and Google is treating them as two separate domains. That means your PR and rankings are all getting split between the two domains and it also means Google may think some of your pages are duplicates and will remove them from their index.

*Eventually* Google will probably reconcile the two URLs. You can help things move along faster by setting up a .htaccess file to redirect the traffic to the proper URL. You'll find details on my site at http://rainborick.inpacifica.com/seo-tips9.html
Be prepared for a long seige. I've had several clients with this problem, and it can take weeks for this situation to begin to resolve itself. There's nothing else you can do except install this fix and wait it out. But it will get fixed eventually. Good luck!

[James95]

Same thing happened to me. Site was doing fine and then Bam. Im slowly rebounding. Went from page 1 on the results to page 20 or so. Im back up to page 3 for my keywords and slowly climbing back. Patience

James
www.carlsoncarpet.com
www.carpet-cleaners.info

[Marko Peric]

Glad to hear that your site is recovering. Did you install a .htaccess redirect to help with the problem? I've done that, and I've noticed a fair amount of redirects in my logs (many for my rss file - apparently half of the syndication services have my site without the www). So far my traffic remains low, and I'm fairly certain that's from lack of search engine visitors. Hopefully this will resolve quickly.

[James95]

Actually I haven't done that yet. Im still pretty new to this, Im slowly learning. Its on the top of my list. Im sure that would help me further.