Does your site all of a sudden have a Google PageRank of PR0?

Don’t worry. Relax! There are many reason why this could have happened. Yes, it could be caused by something you have done wrong… but also, it could be caused from a million and one other things.

If your site had a Google PageRank of PR5 and suddenly after the latest PageRank update, it became a PR0… don’t worry, don’t freak out, and don’t get discouraged.

If you are a real blogger and not a spammer… there is a logical reason for this sudden drop in Google PageRank.

Don’t jump to conclusions and start removing content from your site, don’t change the look, design, or change your SEO strategies… just chill for a little bit. Let the dust settle down from the PR Update. Don’t do anything drastic to your site. The first thing you should do is investigate and try to play detective and figure out why your Google PageRank dropped. Here is a guide I wrote to help you do this.

A Guide For Investigating a Sudden Drop In PageRank:

1. Don’t freak out
2. Don’t make sudden changes to your site
3. Don’t re-map your SEO strategies and thinking
4. Do. Investigate and try to figure out what happened.
5. Visit Google and make note of the pages within your site that Google has indexed.
6. Review the links in these individual pages and verify if the pages you have linked to have been indexed in Google.
7. If not, then that could be your problem, you might be linking into a bad neighborhood .
8. If so, but they rank poorly because of their content’s level of quality, you might still consider this link as a link into a bad neighborhood and remove it from your site.
9. Consider what I call Touch and Go Commenting. If you practice touch and go commenting, then your Google PageRank might have dropped partly because of this. Touch and Go Commenting is the practice of publishing excellent quality and relevant content in the form of a comment on other sites, but never come back… The content is great! The comment was awesome… Google indexed your page because your comment appeared on the home page of the site you published on, within their recent comments section… A few days later… when Google comes back to index that site, it makes note that your link has been removed from the page. This could potentially look bad. Because Googlebots are AI and learn from our own actions and behaviors. If authors remove links from their site… typically there is a good reason for it. The author might feel it links to bad content, or it could simply be spam. Either way… Googlebots see that the link is removed, and you now have one less backward link to your site. And also, we have to assume (or the Googlebot does) that your link was removed because of bad content, bad neighborhood, etc… So my advise to you is… if you do comment on other sites, it might be a good idea to continue to comment on that site… because if a Googlebot catches your link on a page, its a good idea for you to keep it there… otherwise the Googlebot might assume that it was removed because you are a spammer or a contributed towards to spread of bad neighborhoods.
10. Control your content… be consistent with what you talk about… perhaps  you have just confused Google with what type of content to expect? Be consistent, be professional, and be careful with who you link to… and the people you associate yourself with online.