PageRank in Decline. Is it Nofollow's Fault?

My PageRank has been in decline lately. I was as high as a five, but just checked and am now down to three. Was it something I said? Or is this the result of rel="nofollow"?

My guess is that it’s a little bit of both. It seems that this has been implemented far and wide, but in such a manner as taking a sledgehammer to pound in a nail.

Hopefully I can correct this in Subtext. First, I need to make sure that rel="nofollow" can be turned off and on easily in Subtext. I really don’t need it since I delete comments left on my blog almost immediately.

Better yet is to have Subtext render the rel="nofollow" in the attributes of comments for a short period of time (configurable of course). After that period is over, the rel="nofollow" is removed. By then you should have surely deleted the comment. That way we can all spread the Google Juice around.

If that doesn’t help, then I’ll start link whoring. Hello? Link to me!

UPDATE: My blog’s homepage is ranked three, but my archives are ranked five. Odd.

What others have said

Requesting Gravatar... Scott Cadillac Aug 24, 2005 7:33 PM
# re: PageRank in Decline. Is it Nofollow's Fault?
I've got a similar problem. Earlier this year I was up to 6 in some places, but mostly it's been hovering between 4 and 5.

But now about a month ago I noticed my root address of http://custom.softwarefor.net/ is 0, but if I go to http://custom.softwarefor.net/default.aspx then it's 3. And oddly enough my contact page is 4, but some of my more highly linked articles are lower. I think someone or something is asleep at the switch at Google.

I linked to you, from my link section (pr 3). Hope that helps.
Requesting Gravatar... Niels Hansen Aug 24, 2005 8:58 PM
# re: PageRank in Decline. Is it Nofollow's Fault?
Do you know what your average daily page views are? Do you think that has gone down as well? I recall that you had some political posts before the election. Now that people are not so interested in poltics as the moment, could that be where the decline is coming from?

I am around a 3 myself. I think a lot helped when one of my posts was added to a couple apple sites and got over 5,000 new page views in one day.

Requesting Gravatar... Haacked Aug 25, 2005 12:00 AM
# re: PageRank in Decline. Is it Nofollow's Fault?
My daily page views are slightly down this week, but haven't been declining. They've steadily gone up. Though I noticed my AdSense impressions dropped markedly on Aug 20 and have stayed down.
Requesting Gravatar... jayson knight Aug 25, 2005 2:11 PM
# re: PageRank in Decline. Is it Nofollow's Fault?
I've noticed some strangeness on my site as well:

-Homepage (jaysonknight.com) is a 4, yet the traffic to that page is abysmal to say the least.
-Blog is a n/a (jaysonknight.com/blog), and it's got some pretty decent traffic coming in.
-Gallery is a 3, and has more traffic than my homepage but not as much as the blog page.

Overall since moving to CS (which also makes use of nofollow) my site traffic has dropped drastically and I haven't been able to crawl back up to a 5. In all, there are just too many variables on my end to try and figure out wtf is going on, though I also agree that something strange is going on over at Google.

When I was on .Text I was receiving roughly 15x as much traffic, most of it Google generated, whereas my new site simply doesn't seem to be Google friendly whatsoever. But I digress.
Requesting Gravatar... Ryan Rinaldi's Blog Aug 25, 2005 3:30 PM
# PageRank numbers drop. Story at 11.
According to a very smart man (Haacked), his PageRank numbers seem to be dropping and he attributes it...
Requesting Gravatar... jayson knight Sep 11, 2005 1:47 AM
# re: PageRank in Decline. Is it Nofollow's Fault?
It would appear you're back up to a 5...perhaps just a hiccup over at Google?
Requesting Gravatar... Haacked Sep 11, 2005 5:03 PM
# re: PageRank in Decline. Is it Nofollow's Fault?
Yeah, I noticed that too! I wonder. Either it was a hiccup, or the link from BoingBoing picked me up.
Requesting Gravatar... hypotheek May 03, 2008 7:14 PM
# re: PageRank in Decline. Is it Nofollow's Fault?
I noticed the ups & downs of PR at our own mainsite (www.hypotheekindex.nl) and published a nice graph from the last 4 years. You should do the same! It is almost 3 years ago since this blog and still the PR is going up & down, also for you.

Offcourse, the PR is not THE factor anymore but still... Good to have a high one, and currently we have 0 (yes zero, you read it correct ;-))

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