After more than two months of suffering a PR1 from my previous PR5, MikeLopez.info now goes up to PR4. It’s still one PR less than my original PR5 but at least it’s at lot better than just a PR1. I’m not sure what caused the PR drop or today’s PR rise – all I can say is that I’m happy.
But I do have a hypothesis…
More than a month ago, I checked with Google webmaster tools and found that I’m having lots and lots and lots of 404s on my site. Funny thing is that the URLs that are showing as 404s in Google webmaster tools are spam URLs. My first thought was that Big G was penalizing me for not maintaining my site properly. Another hypothesis offered by Benj was that my site was being linked via a proxy server and thus effectively creating duplicate content. I checked Google if I was suffering from the proxy black hat technique and was happy to know that I was not.
So, what did I do? I came into conclusion that the PR drop was caused by the 404s so I decided to do a 404 robots.txt solution for it. After waiting for some time, the 3000+ 404 errors reported by Google webmaster tools dropped to 500+ and I expect it to fall down to zero. Now, my PR is rising again and I hope it stays the same.
What about you? Have you suffered from these sudden PR drops?
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October 29th, 2007 at 6:21 am
It’s good that you were able to regain at least 3 of your PR rankings. My blog dropped from PR5 to PR4 after the recent update.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Yes. I hope for it go back to PR5 after all the 404s have been removed from Google’s list.