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February 5th, 2009 
QuadsZilla I have no idea why, but my user friendly sitemap (that links all posts by title) and my about page on this blog have lost all page rank even though they are linked from every page on the blog.
Some of the category pages suffered the same fate
Google
Doorway Pages
While most others did not:
Myspace Friends
Black Hat Site Reviews
Poker
I know, I know – who cares about page rank? But still – this does mean something – I just have no idea what.
Any thoughts?
Posted in 
Did you recently change webhosts? On my website, I had a PR4 before I changed webhosts and it went down to a 0 for MONTHS…which seemed like a year. Nothing changed besides my host (and dns server names). It took about 3 or 4 months to get my pagerank back, but it’s now only a 3, and my traffic has increased dramatically since then, so I don’t know what the hell is going on. What I do know is that it’s the least important thing to me now that I see it can change so drastically so quickly. Alexa is a batter measure (it has its flaws as well) of standing than Google Pagerank in my book.
I should also note that another site I referred to my host had the same thing happen, they changed to my host recently and they’re used to be PR4 is now a 0…weird.
nope – same webhost.
Sometime back several links (FAQ Privacy Contact etc – boilerplate links that are at the very of the html.) all dropped PR from four to grey. Only change was their location however I can’t be certain if this was the reason.
All other sitewide navigation retained their PR.
Is Google deciding their importance as zilch?
The goog seems to really be less and less capable of handling it’s own data, so that’s basically what to expect.. So wanting to index and make all data in the world accessible to everyone might still be a bit too much for them to handle!
(especially when it turns out that there’s so much commercially interesting data they’d rather keep to themselves.. like referrer data..)
Maybe all the sites that linked back to your site are dead or their PR have been dropped too
I have noticed it on 2 different sites I manage – html sitemaps dropped from PR4 and PR2 to grey, both in the last week. two totally different niches, sizes, even in two different languages.
I’m seeing it on other blogs too. Also seeing the sitemap.xml getting no page rank on a few that I checked. Perhaps it has to do with external links to the page? or the URL string?
One thing seems certain, Google seems to not want to rank these pages or allow them to pass link juice.
When I saw it on the first site, I thought maybe it was some auto filter for pagerank, that had penalized that page for the amount of links on it (very crappy sitemap.html with too many links on it – like, a link to every page on the site). But the other site I mention only has around 30-40 links on the sitemap page.
I wonder if turning the sitemap page (on my sites) into a more informational style sitemap (split the sitemap into sections, short intro texts per section, so it would be more like a “normal” page) would reverse this?
The research we have been doing on this points to the need for external links to these pages. We are seeing this across more and more sites that we manage.
Your “Google” and “Doorway Pages” category pages now have PageRank back.
But looking at it – those are the pages in your top menu, and are site-wide. With all the previous suggestions about doing “PageRank sculpting” from Matt Cutts, maybe Google are realising that site-wide links on your site to other pages are not always to key pages (e.g. “about us”, “privacy policy”) and are doing some sort of algo to try and reduce the PageRank of these?
Probably just means Google’s about to drop the hammer like in a disaster movie where they have the minor events happen before a volcano erupts in New York or something.
I’ve used zero scientific analysis to come to this conclusion.