My Website Ranking Dropped after Changing Templates

Marketing
1

Ok, so I had a Google Page Rank of 1, but then I changed my Drupal templates and my PR became 0. Does anyone know what might have caused this? I’m new to this SEO stuff (as you can probably tell)…

2

Changing from one template to another with exactly the same content will have no effect on PR since PR is just a calculation based on the incoming links to the page and has nothing whatever to do with what is in the page itself at all. Also the single digit PR figures that are made public are based on calculations from several months earlier. In addition a move of one digit downwards may not be anything to do with loss of links to your site but simply that you haven’t grown your links as fast as other sites.

Given all this the change in your PR when you changed template can be nothing more than a coincidence.

3

Could you please elaborate how the above points affect Google’s Page Rank, in particular how they would influence a drop in ranking? Note, I’ve removed one point as that one is correct and makes sense without the need for clarification.

4

Please remove any references to SEO from your signature if you don’t even understand the basics of how PR works.

Thank you

5

this has absolutely nothing to do with Page Rank, and this info comes from someone with a link to SEO tips in his signature…

I’m sometimes shocked to see the amount of misinformation that is being spread around with regards to SEO.

6

It should be because you change your template, some code has been change such as H1, H2, H3 tag or something more …

7

Google Page Rank has absolutely nothing to do with your template. It’s a measure of your link popularity, i.e. the links pointing to your site (individual pages of your site to be more precise*) and their rank. Generally, the more links point to your site, the higher your Google Page Rank. The whole algorithm is more complex, taking into account the page rank of the linking site as well as the amount of other links on that site. Also note that links can have rel=“nofollow”, these links will be ignored.

I’ll leave it to somebody else to explain why you might have dropped.

  • just to add, this also means that it’s possible that some single pages of your site may have a significantly higher or lower page rank than others. This is even true between the www & non-www version of those pages of your site if you don’t have a redirect from one to the other in place.
8

The template could:

  1. Not be optimized for SEO. Would have to see old/ new ones.
  2. Have technical errors that is causing a Google penalty.

Other potential problems:

  1. New site with no links to it.
  2. Links you have were recently devalued by Google.
  3. Content on your site is poor.

– lots of other potential issues could have caused the PR drop. Concentrate on building quality content and it will eventually fix itself.