Google Page Rank and Changes to 3dSkiMaps.com

From time to time people ask what will happen if they make major changes to their site, so I thought I'd give an account of my recent experience.

My site, 3dSkiMaps used to have under 1000 visitors a month, probably mostly bots and crawlers. Actually I was trying to not have be too popular because my 3d ski maps weren't ready. But the site did manage a PR of 4 and that with only a few low quality external sites linking in, and it had the number one spot for my primary key phrase. It was a vertical market with no competitors.

Then I finally decided to make a big push on it, and some new competition came onto the playing field. I completely revamped the site, adding a few hundred new pages but obsoleting a few hundred in the process. I posted to some relevant forums, and started getting over 3000 visitors per month, excluding spiders and the like. 3dSkiMaps' Alexa rank went from about 4.8 million to around 320,000 now.

But my links dropped to 0 even while more and more sites were linking to my site, and my Page Rank dropped to 0 over a 2 month period. It was weird watching it happen one by one on the Google servers on livepr.raketforskning.com. Finally after about 9 weeks all servers gave 3dSkiMaps a zero for PR.

But now 11 weeks after the beginning of my campaign, Google shows 25 good links. Never mind that a search for 3dskimaps yields 740 results and climbing.

Meanwhile, my visitors remain steady and even my not very well placed Adsense ads are getting higher click through. It will be interesting to see what happens over the Summer.

I guess it's true that PR isn't everything, and you can still have good news in the face of not so good statistics as long as you continue to build and/or profit from your traffic. Now that Google is showing that I have links again, I expect the PR to begin rising too.