Google PR increase = links to site reset??
 

Hey everyone. Thanks for the help the other day, I think I have figured something out though.

A couple days ago I noticed a massive drop in traffic, and at first I thought it was Superbowl. Well, that was unlikely, and traffic is still down. I did some poking around and found that my main site went from PR0 to PR1. It's "links to my site" went from 57,000+ to 1.

I thought something happened, and checked my other newer site and found it went from 2800 links to site to 26.

People thought maybe I had gotten a Google penalty, but both my sites? even my newer site that gets almost no traffic? I looked into this and found that usually when people get a penalty they get a message as well about unatural links or whatever.. Well, I have not received any messages.

I just for fun went to check my newest sites' PR which was always 0, and found it is now PR2!, the index splash page was PR2, and the main page of that site is PR1.

Well, now that I found both my sites have been affected by this massive drop in links to site, and they have also both increased in PR, I think it may be related. I did some looking around and saw from lots of other peoples posts that when they had ranked up in PR, they also have links reset, and they slowly started coming back over the next couple weeks.

What do you guys think? Does PR change result in a "link to your site" reset in Webmaster Tools? From what I have seen so far, everything points to yes. Am I right?

Another example how useless Google toolbar pagerank is.

Don't read too much into anything. You're just mind fucking yourself. Rankings move around, traffic fluctuates. Build, link .... Build, link .... Focus on long term building, not short term panic moves based on myth, hype and horrible information.

according to Google listed PR means nothing for SE results.

Thanks for the help Squealer. I am new to all this, and I naturally have a thing where I try to figure shit out, can't help myself even if I have no understanding of it. I just for some reason have to try to figure it out or it bothers me. :Oh crap

Great to know though that I shouldn't focus on such things. Just keep on truckin', yeah?

Thanks guys, you are all so helpful and I and others really appreciate all the excelent help.

What would cause such a massive drop in impressions in SE results?

Do you guys think the "Links to your site" will come back in time?
Since they went down traffic has too, probably related.

It still determines how deep and how often the page is spidered. Google is just telling people that it means nothing these days so that people will stop manipulating PR and selling links to do that..

Pretty sure the links report error is a glitch...

https://productforums.google.com/for...ls/_r3YwCyJvB4[1-25-true]

Page rank is page rank, not website rank, Your home page usually gets the higher page rank because you are linking to it the most... Well guess what... Nobody cares about page rank. Even google... All my websites have more traffic to their internal pages than their home pages. Even on most of them internal pages appear higher in serps. Focus on your content and nothing else. Only then you will be fine.

There are tons of reasons this happens. This is why i'm saying you need a long term plan. It could be an algorithm tweak (they are rolled out 1-2 times a day). It could be that you were linking too fast for those phrases from low quality sites (in which case it will still bounce back over time). It could be that you got pushed down by people that are simply better than you (your site and rankings do not exist in a vacuum).

Plan for the long term. The more you get caught up in short term changes, the more shitty/reactive decisions you'll make and the worse you'll do. Build big. Link slow. Don't stop. Toolbar PR/webmaster tools, how many links show etc has nothing to do with anything. Create a plan, follow it. No one here can tell you with 100% accuracy what happened because there are 1000 factors to consider.

Some really good answers in this thread :thumbsup

Very helpful, thanks again for the help.