There are numerous reasons as to why a website may lose its Google pagerank. With the change to the new Panda update, many webmasters are making conscious efforts to maintain or increase their website’s ranking, and for good reason. The higher the PageRank comes the better the benefits including increased traffic and ad revenue.

Listed below are a few points to help you maintain your Google Pagerank.

Keyword Stuffing
A (SEO) search engine optimization technique in which a web page is loaded with keywords in the content or meta tags. This is also considered an unethical practice. To avoid accidental keyword stuffing, it is a best practice to observe your content keyword density for overuse and replace words that have been overly used with other or alternate words that have the same or similar meaning and can serve in place of the primary keyword. Use  keywords sensibly, reasonably, and where necessary.

Duplicate Content
Google penalizes websites whose content is copied from others. A website with most of its content duplicated is considered a spam site. Many webmasters outsource content either by buying or hiring freelancers. It is important to have a copyscape account so you can check for uniqueness before buying your articles.

Cloaking
Is used as a (SEO) search engine optimization technique in which search engine spiders are redirected to content that is different from the information presented in the user’s browser. Cloaking will not get your site a Higher Pagerank; however it can get your site penalized or even banned.

Buying and Selling Backlinks
A page rank is just like a vote. Google uses the PageRank to gauge a website’s popularity and relevance to a specific keyword; therefore, buying or selling links is definitely an effort to try and trick the system.

Malware Pages
If Google detects your site as a source of malware, users will be warned before sending them to your site. Try to maintain your site by keeping it free from malware and hackers. You can do this by using Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool to keep your site healthy.

Broken Links
A broken link is a website url, or web page in which the link no longer works. Whenever one or more pages cannot be accessed due to broken links then then that page can lose some Pagerank positioning, thus affecting the whole website. You can avoid this by regularly checking your links for interconnectivity.

Webpage Load Times
If your websites loads quickly then you don’t have to worry about a decrease in pagerank. However if Google strains to access your website you may end up losing a few points that would have helped you up the pagerank ladder. Check your servers to ensure that your site loads quicker.

Bad robots.txt
Sometimes bad robots.txt files block the spiders from crawling your website. To get a PageRank the bots must crawl and index your site. Using Google’s Webmaster Tools you can test if your robots.txt are up and functioning.

Avoid Linking to Penalized Sites
You should always be careful when building backlinks to your site. A handful of links from banned sites won’t harm your website’s ranking, but do not over depend on getting any traffic from banned sites. Also, if you have a lot of links from penalized sites, you can cause your website’s page rank to decrease.

Crystal Watts is a web publisher and writer for websites24seven.com and the wattspublishinggroup.com – her expertise and passion includes web technology, online business, monetization, seo and social media marketing.