I really don't believe PageRank is worth much, but it's how Google says they determine what goes into their supplemental index. Over the past few months 100 pages on my site have disappeared from Google's index. Others have suffered massive demotions in their SERP position, while most of what's left is doing pretty well.

So I'm hoping people can help my understand what happened to this one page in particular? My Vancouver photo gallery has a PR of 4, and all of the photos that make up the gallery except one have a PR of 2 to 3. The best photo in the gallery shows "err" instead, and while it used to come up #9 it's buried I don't even know how deep. My Mountains of North Vancouver page has fallen out of favor, and I don't understand why. As far as I know most of the photo pages have similar link profiles, but more to the point the gallery itself seems to be enough to get the pages it links to indexed, except for this one.

Stumble Upon has sent a few thousand people to the page, and while it used to pick up some search traffic, that stopped completely. More to the point, it's not the only one Google forgot about, and they seem to be least impressed with my best photos. I've been improving my design as much as I know how to, and I've been adding more text to each of the photos, things that both the general public and other photographers will find interesting. But what can I do to prevent any more pages from dropping off the face of the 'net, and to get the disappeared back?

If you want to be sucessful with google - you have to show google that your website grow fast

BTW Forrest, there are a lot of grey boxes on your pages due to IE6's aversion to PNGs.

One thing I have noticed is that you have no "home" link on any pages. This will probably not be helping.
Having a "fully meshed" navigation, where each main page does link back to each other will "circulate" the link value (and the real PR) within the site and reduce the effective "click depth" of the secondary pages.

The way the navigation is currently, produces a "tree" structure of the page links with "home" page as the root, then all pages radiate off this, thus making your home page, in effect a "splash" page.

Does IE not display PNG's? - I use those a lot, but always use FF so I never noticed

It's ok with PNG's upto a point

But add an alpha transparency to it and IE6- throws a wobbler and displays a grey box.
There is a fix detailed in this thread which apparently works more reliably than the javascript one at IE PNG fix

Forrest overlays a transparent png onto the images, it doesn't stop the image stealing downloaders but it means they don't get what they expect

thanks very much for that

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Forrest overlays a transparent png onto the images, it doesn't stop the image stealing downloaders but it means they don't get what they expect

This is a diamond in the rough... We run a lot of image intense sites (i.e. galleries). The overlay idea would be a winner for us. Thanks very much.

Now here's the irony ... I stopped doing that for the main images ( typically 800x533 px ) but still use the effect for thumbnails in the galleries. I might go back to overlaying a blank gif file over the big image, but that was more of a pleasant side effect. I started out doing the drop shadow in Photoshop, then I changed background colors and had a world of pain. So I've been exploring with different ways to use a drop-shadow in CSS that will let me change backgrounds at will. The first one used the png as the main image, and the jpeg as the background image; a couple days after changing it to more regular coding, my Google Image traffic started to skyrocket.

Chris - thanks very much for the png thread! I've been struggling with this for a while, and I've actually lost portrait customers because of it. The full sized images don't look perfect, but at least they display on IE 6 now, but without being able to see the thumbs, it's bad.