Can changing WHOIS site info result in a PageRank drop?

• I changed my WHOIS information recently on a site that had a stable PR 6 score for the last several years. Within hours of making the change my site dropped to a PR 4? Can changing the legal information for your website cause this drop and what should I do to reverse it?

Answer: There have been many instances where a site that changed ownership had its PageRank reset by Google. But when this has happened the site was taken immediately to a PageRank 0. That would not seem to be the case with you since, as you stated, your PageRank suffered only a partial deduction from a PageRank 6 to a PageRank 4.

Note that Google has been doing a lot of PageRank updates during 2008. Before you assume this PageRank drop was due to a WHOIS info change, make sure that the PageRank decrease was not related to something else on your site. A site can drop from a PageRank 6 to a PageRank 4 for a variety of different reasons, some of which include...

• Too many irrelevant, off topic backlinks
  
  
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
  
  
• Over-stuffing your pages with keyword-dense content to influence rankings
  
  
• Cross-linking your various sites
  
  
• Another Google penalty that had nothing to do with your WHOIS info (check out our recent Guide to Google Penalties)
  
  
• Having existing backlinks to your site devalued by Google

It's worth noting that toolbar PageRank represents the tail-end of a PageRank change that Google has been implementing for some time. Your PageRank is continuously calculated internally by Google across many datacenters, with Google sending a simplified version of this data to the toolbar a few times per year.

That means any changes you see to the toolbar PageRank were actually calculated a long time ago. If you made this WHOIS change and then immediately noticed your PageRank decrease, odds are very good the timing was just...