Search Engine Forums, SEO Forum

Hi everybody,

Can anyone answer, if meta tag changing can reduce PR in Google?
It's already happen to me two times. My site is www.supremedeal.com
I use to have PR5, then I started website optimization. It required a slight change of META TAGS (title, desctiption,keywords). Then I noticed Google stoped visiting my site for a few days, and then PR was reduced to PR4. It was about a year ago.

Now, about a week ago I started the same procedure again for optimization purposes (it doesn't look I became smarter). And Google behave in the same manner. PR is reduces to PR3, no matter that the site is almost 100% optimized by title, description & keywords, and also the number of reciprocal links was increased.

Here is the question, is Google really so punishing sites for changing meta tags, or it's just coincident

I would appreciate if someone answer.
Have a great day,

It's not recommended that you change page titles and descriptions often, but updating pages is a natural process of the Web and shouldn't make a difference in ranking or PR unless you do it all the time (1 time a year is good unless you are just replacing certain words from time to time).

It's most likely coincidental and more has to do with Google's PR filtering and algo. It may have just gotten more strict for your industry requiring more BL's in order to get back up to a PR=5.

Are SE bots visiting the site daily, weekly, monthly (you can see in your traffic logs)? Some analytics programs actually allow you to see how often Google bot visits your site and which pages it crawls most often.

PR affects how often the Google bot visits your pages, and not where you rank in SERP's.

If you are trying to get the meta's right and up to date you may want to change them to this:
Keep in mind that most SE's do not use meta content contained within the keywords tag. The page title is the best place to optimize for keywords within the page header. Page descriptions should be in sentence form and not just keywords listed. Descriptions will be the basis for the user when they see your site in the search results, so you should make it catchy unique and including a few keywords in sentence form. The only CAPS in the mets should be in the title. You can capitalize the first letter of each word in the title (except words like 'the' 'a' 'for' etc).

Meta Tags have nothing to do with PR. PR is solely based on number of links to your website and the quality of links toyour website. Internal link structure also has some effect.

Thanks to provide us the great informative concept.

I don't thing that a slight change in meta tags may change your PR, but I didn't want to start writing about that.

My website used to have PR 4, now it has 3, but the number of visitors I was getting increased. So, I didn't and don't care about the drop.

Focus on what is important. PR does not guarantee you have a successful website. Rather than trying to increase PR, make your website sell more and get more visitors.

Changing your metatags won't affect your pagerank. PR is calculated based on quality of backlinks, not on metatags.

They both are different thing. Search engines see Meta tags for keywords ranking in SERPs and PR indicates how important your page is for Google.

Changing or adding meta tags won't effect your PR, Google gives PR on the basis of quality incoming links and internal links. It's a coincident for you that you updated your meta tags and got PR down. I suggest you to check out your incoming links and internal links. Check your broken links.

Making changes on page title by keeping the keywords is good.. Some time thise cause of getting some promotion in SERP... This is according to my experiance...
But its will never effect on PR...

Do you still think that meta tag is anything to do with search engine results? G has accepted the lowest importance of meta tags in rankings. I think there is some other problem which has lead to lowering of your website's ranking.

Changing anything about a website will not effect PR. The only thing that changes PR is the number of dofollow links to that particular page.

Changing meta tag on a page won't affect it's PR. PR change is more on backlinks.

Though changing meta tags may affect your ranking with crucial keywords but it should not cast any shadow on your PR.

PR concerns about links, links that are pointing to your site. The more number of quality links the better the PR. But I think google doing some changes of that because of manipulation by using paid links.

Metatags don't have a direct relation to pagerank. You can change it anytime you want to and your PR will remain the same. It can, however, affect your position in SE.