The forum was going great.... DMOZ and Google Directory listed after the first year. VBSEO installed and sitemaps working great. Now it's two years old, over 6000 backlinks listed in Link Popularity, nearly 30,000 pages indexed in Google. I was a PR3 for the past year or so, and working to getto a four.

A couple of weeks ago, it went to a PR2.

What the heck did I do wrong?

Only things that transpired in the past couple months was I bought a competitors expired domain name (dodgecitytalk.com) and forwarded it to mine (dodgeboard.com). I also redid some of the links in the navbar to get rid of the clutter and organize them into javascipt drop down menus.

I don't get it....but then again I am no expert on SEO.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I am calling in a favor Brandon... Can you help me out? I'll owe ya one (wink)

You probably didn't do anything really.

PR is an obscure thing anyway run from their end assessing links to you somehow.

Maybe the recent directory dumping etc made an impact.

What I can say from experience is that I feel there's less emphasis placed on PR today than there was a year ago when it comes to Google SERP's.

If you had some comparable data regarding keyword Google searches then and now you'd find your position much stronger now than a year ago although your PR went down.

Worry not.

Mine's gone up to 2 now

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I wouldn't worry to much about page rank, A lot of sites dropped pr with this last update. The only suggest I have is just to work on more backlinks.

I have a few services I offer for backlinks, if you're interested, we can chat on the phone, so I don't have to type a paragraph up..lol

cheers

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I am one person who hates putting a ton of weight on "Pagerank". Worry more about your actual positioning in the SERPs than a number on a little green graph, the first of the 2 is MUCH MUCH more important.

As for everyones PR going down, it was bound to happen. If you think, 1000's of new sites daily, and its a scale from 1 to 10, as sites get older they're naturally gonna get more links and things, so you're gonna have to continue to adjust the #'s for the PR. I wouldn't worry about it, but then again, I never do. I've been a PR 2 in my first year, and I'm fine with that.

Did you do a 301redirect?

This means google can't see those links, though this shouldn't effect the PR. But it is bad for SEO as it prevents bots to efficently crawl your site.

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Yes, I did a 301 redirect (moved peanantly)

How does this differ as opposed to a frame redirect, as far as SEO is concerned...which is better? I had first tried a frame redirect, but figured Google may punish me for dupe content, so I changed it to a 301 redirect.


As far as the navigational changes- I am still seeing the spiders crawl the horoscope, vbTube and other things that are only accessible through the drop down menus. I figured that meant they were able to find the links to those pages.

Then again, I do submit a sitemap to Google/Yahoo.

The site is DodgeBoard.com "Dodge City On The Net" if you want to take a look.

Well, a 301 redirect basically says that URL 2 is the new location for [OLD URL], they have the same content, so transfer all the linkbacks to this new address.

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