Hi Jen!
I had a look at your site (it's very pretty!), and found nothing there
that would upset the Googlebot. It's content rich, well
organized...but you *did* recently move... Did someone forget to
update their listings for you? I believe so.
Here's what Google has to say about Page Rank and your situation:
"We update our index every four weeks. Each time we update our
database of web pages, our index invariably shifts: We find new sites,
we lose some sites, and sites ranking may change. Your rank naturally
will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. You can be
assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost
the ranking of a site. Google's order of results is automatically
determined by several factors, including our PageRank algorithm.
Please check out our "Why Use Google" page for more information on how
this works.
You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking
to your URL has changed. This is the single biggest factor in
determining what sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages
when our robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via
hyperlinks. To find out who links to your site, use Google's link:
tool."
Why does my page's rank keep changing?
://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html#A2
...and...
"Regrettably, we cannot manually change your listed address at the
same time you move to your new site.
That said, there are steps you can take to make sure your
transition is a smooth one. Google listings are based in part on our
ability to find you from links on other sites. To preserve your rank,
you will want to inform others who link to you of your change of
address. One way to find out who is linking to you is to try a link
search. Enter "link:[your full URL]" into the Google search box. You
may not find every page that links to you with this method, but it
should help you begin redirecting the links leading to your site.
(Please note: we do not serve link queries for all of the sites in our
index, so this may not produce any results for your site.) Once your
new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a
"301" code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and
search engines that your site has moved.
Finally, if your site goes unlisted for a time, this does not mean
you were dropped from our index. Sometimes, in these transitions, we
will fail to find a site at its new address. Just be sure that others
are linking to you and we should pick you up on our next web crawl."
I'm changing my URL. How can I maintain my rank?
://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html#A4
Note the discussion of links back to your page affecting your Page
Rank. It would appear that *that* is where your problem lies.
I checked both your old and your new URLs to determine who is linking
back to you:
Links to http://www.mybabybella.com : 24 links!
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=link:o86TkS-oo8QJ:www.mybabybella.com/
Links to http://www.jenklairkids.com : 3 links!
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=link:1tdMRg4StYoJ:www.jenklairkids.com/
...and one of those is from one of your internal pages.
The Googlebot has definitely visited you, otherwise, you wouldn't be
in the index. However, he's not finding you from other pages. Since
Page Rank is partially determined by who links to you (making it
easier for the Googlebot to find you), this is what's pulling your
Page Rank down.
How to fix this? Get in touch with the people who previously linked
to you, and ask them to update their links with your new URL
information. The Googlebot will pick up the changes the next time he
visits those pages, and will find you through those as well. It might
take a crawl or two for your Page Rank to scoot back up to where it
was, depending on how many former links are updated and how quickly,
but this ought to solve your problem.
You can find more information about Page Rank and how to keep yours up
here:
Google Information for Webmasters
://www.google.com/webmasters/
Google Webmasters' FAQ
://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html
User Support Forum
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general
Hope this helps! If you need further assistance, please just ask for
clarification. I'll be glad to help!
--Missy
Search terms: None. Bookmarked Google Help pages. |
Request for Answer Clarification by
jen814-ga
on
21 May 2003 16:58 PDT
Missy,
Thanks! That really helps. Well, I did what you suggested and went to
my links that needed to be changed and the majority of them had
already changed to our new URL. Do you think this is just a delay that
will be picked up in the next crawl? Our keywords seem to remain the
same or adjust a bit up and down in google searches. Should I be more
concerned about that than the PR ranking? I did notice that today my
PR dropped to 0, which worries me, but from what you said... it should
move up soon, right? Thanks again. Jen
|
Clarification of Answer by
missy-ga
on
21 May 2003 18:30 PDT
Yes, Jen, I think it should be picked up in the next crawl or two!
If the folks linking to you have already changed their links, you're
fine. It's most likely that the Googlebot had already visited them
before they made the changes.
Have patience! The Googlebot, while a pretty efficient little
critter, does tend to take his time, and he goes out on his own
schedule.
Good luck!
--Missy
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