The sudden drop in PR for Arena Flowers from 5 to 3 has been really frustrating and disappointing. Over the last few months quality links has been the buzzword and to that effect, we have been trying to squeeze out editorially vouched links for the site from related domains. At Arena Flowers, we are really proud of our SEO activities. But the anomalistic (it is indeed) drop in PR has got us racking our brains trying to point the drop to a certain differentiator. What’s more annoying is the drop in all the internal pages. We have about 100, 000 pages indexed in Google of which at least 25 % of them had decent PR and none of them have green liquid anymore. The real disappointment is to see our blog have no PR. Flowers…Uncut is widely followed and we have got so much of appreciation for our site through the blog. We also have hundreds of quality incoming links to the blog. To see the blog have no PR value is a bit disconcerting.

We have scoured the Internet and scouted all the SEO blogs and forums and even had an opinion from a global expert in the industry, without success. SEO experts argue that PR is in no way related to SERPs and traffic and makes little sense to websites, unless the sites are based on selling links. But we see PR as an indicator of our SEO performance apart from the other variables like ranking high on SERPs, traffic etc. Post PR drop, traffic is unaffected and SERPs for competitive keywords have not had any impact. However, the little green bar though irritating, does offer some satisfaction when it is a bit longer than it was previously.

It will be a real bonus if we get to the bottom of our mysterious PR drop on the home page as well as the internal pages. I contemplated posting a query on Matt Cutt’s blog, but decided against it as I feel it would be futile. There are millions of websites and even if 10 % of these websites start querying their site problems with Matt, then he would have to quit his regular job at Google.

It’s all back to square one…wonder how long it takes to be back again!

Google seems to be dancing these days. There has been plenty of talk on the SEO front by webmasters who are reporting significant fluctuations in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) over the last few weeks. Being a forum user, I have noticed that some of the digital pointers (A Forum for Webmasters) are being penalised either by a drop in SERPs or by Google’s Houdini Act where the websites don’t rank for their own keywords. A good example are some prominent Web Directories which offer Paid Link Services such as Alive, Aviva etc. Is it the end of road for Directories?

For years, Digital Point has been a great resource for Webmasters, where they have exchanged news, views and expertise and benefited from each other in fine tuning SEO skills. The Administrators have done a commendable job by bringing together hundreds of webmasters with a shared vision. So it comes as no surprise that any changes in the Google World is first highlighted and discussed on Digital Point. Digital Point has been offering good insights into Google’s efforts in optimising the quality of the results, while also conveying the webmaster’s concerns.

Off late, a few webmasters at Digital Point have been hit with Google penalty. We have had official words from Google on how hard they have been trying to deliver quality results to the user. This is clearly reflected in the new message centre webmaster tools, which Google uses to communicate with the webmasters.

After months of effort on search optimisation at Arena Flowers, where we explored every possible avenue of driving in more traffic to Google, we seemed to be breaking into the league of appearing higher on the SERPs for some competitive keywords. Some time mid September, due to Google’s generous tweaking of the results pages, we ranked fairly high for a few of our targeted keywords. But we lasted only a couple of weeks and now we are lost somewhere in the results pages, which has affected our traffic and our conversion rates. As I write this, there have been further changes to the results pages. Our blog used to rank higher than our homepage on the result pages after the mid September changes. Now our homepage appears higher. These changes are giving us a few jitters and raising a few thoughts:

1. Are we being penalised?
2. Did our competitors get more competitive?
3. All’s well, its just Google’s algorithm updation which should happen soon and we’ll be back to normal.

I would love to believe its No. 3. We have always adhered to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. We surely can’t be a victim of Google’s latest tirade on Paid Links. Of course, we have paid for advertising our business on flower related online media. In terms of SEO, we have submitted our site to a few hundred free web directories, while we have exchanged links with flower and gift related sites. But definitely not to inflate our traffic artificially. PageRank doesn’t matter to us. We are not Link Sellers to benefit from a higher PageRank. We are only bothered about ranking well for prominent keywords in the flower business, to make it easier for our customers to reach us. Reciprocal linking and directory submission does not give any quality traffic which could translate into sales. We seek customers who convert well on our marketing spend. I hope Google’s new algorithm helps us achieve this!