Well, one of my web directory’s Page Rank (PR) went down to zero last week. Not really sure what happened but it seems that it went from PR value of 4 to 3 and now down to 0. I was pretty shocked about that and I had known that a lot of web directories had suffered the same fate because of link buying. I admit that I did buy a few links here and there for my directory, but it was not excessive. In fact, I think I bought about 4 links in total. The simple reason - well, I don’t have the money to buy more links. And my web directory is a free directory without any advertisements nor does it have any paid links on it. So why did Google decide to yank my Page Rank? Well, I am not too sure of the reasons but seriously, when does Google has any reason to do what it does.

But I still have to find out the main cause of the drop in Page Rank. From what I know, Google has web directories in their sights for sometime now. Google had often discouraged webmasters from buying links and so I have stopped buying links for months already. My last purchased link was about 9 months ago! So, I doubt that this is the cause of the sudden drop in Page Rank. How about useless content? I have to agree, my web directory isn’t exactly one of the best in the web directory business. The sites listed on the directories are all submitted by my visitors and are usually done by SEO consultants who basically submit the same websites to thousands and thousands of directories using the same anchor text and description. Yes, that’s my fault and probably one of the reasons to kick off my Page Rank. But I am sure there are a lot of such web directories with the same content out there as well and they didn’t had their Page Rank kicked off. Why was mine targeted by Google?

One of the most plausible reasons could be because my Web Directory title had the words “High Page Rank” in it. Google has always wanted their users to ditch Page Rank and start concentrating on content. So my dip in Page Rank could have something to do with Google’s overall objective to reduce the importance of PR and start forcing their users to concentrate on something else? That’s possible too because my search result rankings didn’t drop. A few of my search terms were still ranking pretty high on Google, so I guess any penalty is still restricted to just the PR. Hopefully, nothing will happen to my search engine rankings as I really need them to get visitors.

Well, I guess the only thing I can do is to wait and hope for the best. Thank the gods that I am not like those commercial web directories who has to depend on their Page Rank for survival. Just imagine that one day the PR drops for some of the big commercial web directories and all of a sudden, the income for their owners becomes zip!