
What to do when Google PR0s Your Business - rasengan
http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/what-to-do-when-google-pr0s-your-business/
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_sentient
I see a PR6 for your website, and a Google search for "private internet
access" brings you up as the top result.

The PR score reported by browser plugins can often be incorrect, as Google
usually only bothers to update their forward-facing PR scores every month or
so. Of course, their internal PR is updated constantly.

I've also had my site return a N/A PR score a number of times, and it had no
effect on my actual rankings. It's probably just an issue with your particular
browser plugin, and it should begin reporting correctly within a day or two.

~~~
rasengan
Being the second person to say this, we really hope you are both right. Before
this, we couldn't find anyone, anywhere who could find it reporting anything
other than N/A through sites and plugins. We also waited 24 hours before
bringing this to light to see if the issue would fix itself.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Just to echo the other people on this thread who say that they see PageRank, I
checked and it looks like you have plenty of PageRank internally as well. I
didn't see any manual webspam actions that we'd taken on the site either. Have
you actually checked in the Google Toolbar? That's the only official place to
see our toolbar PageRank--lots of other sites and plugins can be broken in
various ways.

In general, PageRank tends to drop for one of two reasons. The first is url
canonicalization issues (e.g. messing up http vs. https, www vs. non-www,
rel=canonical pointing to weird places like 404 pages). The second reason is
selling links that pass PageRank, which violates our guidelines.

~~~
snowwrestler
Is there any way to access the official PageRank reading on a Mac? As far as I
know Google Toolbar is not available for that platform.

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josscrowcroft
I'd love to know this too - anybody?

~~~
rasengan
I found something from ChromeFans.org which seems to be working quite alright,
although it's not the official Google extension.

Edit: In the Chrome Store

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tylermenezes
It always freaks me out how much power Google really has over all sites, not
just the spammers. The panda update, for example, killed TeachStreet, which
recently ended up selling to Amazon as an aquihire.

~~~
tptacek
What's the conventional wisdom on why Panda hit TeachStreet?

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kjhughes
For the uninitiated, "PR0s" == "set Page Rank to zero".

Glad to see their problem's been resolved.

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jastanton_
Hmmm according to my Chromes SEO Site Tools plugin you're at a PR6

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rasengan
It'd be great news if this is just a bug in a single Google DC/Node, but we're
located in different parts of the world; and we're getting PR0 on all of our
SEO extensions. The prcheck websites are also showing N/A.

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AznHisoka
Why do you care about your toolbar PR? If your site still has traffic from
Google, and still indexed, PR is just a number.

~~~
adorton
A lot of agencies use PR and Alexa rankings to negotiate rates.

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AznHisoka
negotiate rates for what?.. link buying for Pagerank?

~~~
pcopley
Advertisements.

I'm not entirely sure why you're being so hostile since you're clearly not
familiar with the content being discussed.

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aresant
Read the original piece of investigative journalism that started it all here:

[http://llsocial.com/2012/05/search-secrets-prominent-seo-
com...](http://llsocial.com/2012/05/search-secrets-prominent-seo-company-
covertly-purchasing-backlinks-for-fortune-1000/)

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viana007
Talking like a SEO Guy, Pagerank is not a metric for ranking on Google SERP's,
in the past was. But pagerank is good to know the reputation of a site and
advertisements.

The important is ranking for effective keywords and receive traffic from that.
Search for videos of Matt Cutts explaining pagerank.

My advice for you, keep the good work in your site and wait for the next
Pagerank's update.

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joshklein
Hopefully this is just a temporary hiccup, but you should use this opportunity
for scenario planning on what would happen if Google really did cut you off
from search traffic. Even if the return on investment/effort of other traffic
sources appears worse than Google, diversification has its own merits.

~~~
rasengan
This is really good advice. We'll definitely use this opportunity as a warning
to perform preemptive planning should this scenario arise again. Thanks for
pointing this out.

