A little while ago, I decided to drop the ‘www’ from this site. I accomplished this by basically redirecting www.lucasmcdonnell.com to lucasmcdonnell.com. Seemed simple enough at the time — and I preferred leaving out the ‘www’ (it always seems redundant to me).
What this also accomplished however, was to drop my Google PageRank from four to zero. PageRank is basically a score that Google uses to determine how high your site should rank in search results (it’s only part of the Google algorithm however).
I’m sad to see my PageRank go — but I’m hoping this is a temporary situation, and that things will go back to normal. There were quite a few plugin issues around making the change, so I’m really hoping I don’t have to reverse the change — not to mention wondering whether messing around with this further will make things worse rather than better. Strangely, www.lucasmcdonnell.com also shows up as PageRank zero now.
Has anyone has had any experience with redirects and PageRank?
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March 10th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Lucas,
The same thing happened when I dropped the www from my site. If I remember, it only took 2-3 weeks before things went back to normal.
Best,
Curtis
March 11th, 2008 at 12:01 am
I never known about this before…But I do learn from your lesson that dropping the www may cause page rank drop. I hope you’ll get the page rank back soon as Curtis said.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Great to know Curtis! That’s what I was hoping to hear.
And thanks to you to Sylvia, hopefully things will be back to normal soon!
March 15th, 2008 at 6:17 am
I think it is also a good idea to set the preferred domain in the Google Webmaster tools
March 15th, 2008 at 9:07 am
I had forgotten all about Google Webmaster Tools! That’s a really excellent point — I’ve now updated all my URLs (I also realized I had a few sites on there without sitemaps or verification). Keeping things up-to-date there probably wouldn’t hurt.
Thanks for mentioning this.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:07 am
Wow! I hadn’t heard about this happening before. Hopefully things will settle back to normal in a little while.
It’s sad that we all live on PageRank so much. Google’s algorithms can definitely make or break many websites.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Thanks Andrew — I hope things certainly get back to normal soon as well.
Which reminds me… I did a search for some of the search terms/phrases that drew visitors to my website before the PageRank change, and my rankings for those keywords hasn’t changed. It makes me wonder if the PageRank is actually zero, or if the redirect is somehow just messing up the PR stats tools I’ve tried. Then again, my original URL comes up as zero in those tools as well.
Well, fortunately, there’s more to life than PageRank.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
[...] I don’t really care too much about PageRank, I still find it odd that a redirect had dropped my PageRank to 0. Since I wrote that initial post though, I did a few experiments with my search results, and [...]