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!
