Page Rank lost.Reasons and What to do?

Since the day of its inception,Page Rank has enjoyed a unique place in the minds of webmasters and online entrepreneurs.Although Page Rank is not as relevant as it used to be, it still has a mystique aura attached to it.Most SEO consultants and web owners consider Page Rank as an estimation of authority. After the recent Panda and Penguin updates, several sites lost their Page Rank whereas some lucky ones witnessed an increase in PR.This blog had a Page Rank of 4 and after the last update the page rank dropped to 1.Initially i was at shock because it had taken me a lot of time and hard work to gain a Page Rank of 4.After a few days the shock was replaced by sensibility and i began to inquire about what went wrong.

Reasons for drop in page rank

I had long time ago participated in a 'Viral Link Building' campaign.The theme was quite simple.A network of bloggers would do a post with links to several other blogs.Anybody can join this viral tagging system by doing a post on their blog with all the links and adding his own link at the bottom as a tag.This scheme went viral and a lot of bloggers actively participated.I previously had managed to gain several high authority links through various techniques and i considered this new viral thing as a supplement for my link building activity.But after about 2 long years, the thing bit me in the back.Google must have diagnosed it as link bait and penalized my blog for the mistake.But that alone was not the only viable reason.

Blogroll and Link exchange was actively happening in my blog.I even managed to sell some links through Fivver.Although i regret it now.The number of promotional links on my side bar increased and in the end i had to pay for it in the form of a drop in page rank.

Irregularity in content posting was yet another reason for the drop in page rank.I was not updating the blog on a regular basis.I knew i had to post frequently but i got so busy with my real job and all that i hardly got any time to update the blog.Google bot ocassionaly scans your blog whether you want it or not.And if you are not posting regular content, the authority degrades slowly.

What to do?

The most important lesson i have learned after the drop in page rank was that the traffic was not affected marginally (In most cases traffic was not affected at all).Google has mentioned that PR is only one of the 200 parameters that they consider while valuing the authority of a page.

The good news is that you can still enjoy the SERP positions you previously had.If your page has been properly optimized (On page) and you are engaged in safe link building techniques then you have nothing to worry.Make sure that your content is around 400-500 characters long with SEO optimised titles and meta description.If you have the main keywords in the URL itself then you are going the right way.

Can i get the lost PR back?

Now PR updates are happening more frequently.There was one in August and another one in November.A PR update can therefore be expected around Feb-March 2013.You can do extensive link building in the mean time and make sure a strong link profile is presented to Google when it is updating the PR.

If you have a lot of spammy links on your site, then you must remove it as soon as possible.Also you can use the Google disavow tool to block all the low quality inbound links to your site.Take these measures and chances are that your Page Rank will be restored to its lost glory.Feel free to post your thoughts as comments below.