Sudden drop in PageRank to Unranked

[webprolive]

Howdy,

A clients website has just dismorning (8/FEB/13) gone from index page PR:4 to Unranked including all inner pages on the domain.

There is no contact on GWT or penalty email from Google.

All organic rankings seem to be fine, and i read about the GWT backlink glitch earlier.

Should I expect the worst?

Thanks..

Mark

[webprolive]

Hi Cyrus,

Thanks for your detailed reply, really appreciated.

Seems the site did get some what buggy with the new PR update. It was back to normal after 12 hours or so. No drop in rank or traffic over the weekend so it looks like we're in the clear.

The Google cached image of the homepage has resolved it's self also.

Thanks again for your help.

Mark

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Mark,

Toolbar PageRank is often not a very good indicator of how Google actually views your site. The important thing is your rankings and traffic, which you say is fine. This would indicate you are both in Google's index and are being served in search results. Yah!

Google did just update it's Toolbar PageRank, so this could be part of the issue, but I am concerned with how you described the page showing up in search results. (php error)

Here's what you can do to test:

1. In Google Webmaster Tools, use the "Fetch As Googlebot" tool to test if Google can access the homepage

2. Is your homepage in Google's cache? There are many ways to do this, here's one

3. Use the MozBar to crawl as GoogleBot. Set the user agent setting for "Googlebot" (I've attached a screenshot)

The reason for this is sometimes Viruses and Spam Attacks will take over your website and show one version to Google, but another version to users.

If all of these things check out, and you maintain your traffic, you should be fine!

rdyDzvE.png

[webprolive]

Wouldn't we all my friend!

Serious client, lets see how the PR issue pans out over the weekend.

Thanks for the help.

[webprolive]

Thanks for the reply Charles,

The site doesn't have protected WHOIS. Nor does it have 1,000s of backlinks. It would be a 15 year old domain registered on BOTW & DMOZ.So it's very strange!

Google would know the author on Google+ and so forth. It wouldn't be a spammy website. It's a viable business in the training / education industry with 10+ staff.

There is something a bit fishy about the homepage screenshot on the companies SERP.

It's showing a PHP error and a blank white page. But on clicking the result the website is fine. Could this be to do with the site's last indexing? Google have indexed a error homepage which has effected the rest of the site? Note this is the only SERP that has this error.

Thanks for the help!