Lost PR of 3 because of changes, then I got PR 4 !!!

[PriceComparison]

Dear All....

I just want to share my experiences with anybody who is interested with Google PR Ranking and optimization.

Our work for www.PriceComparison.com, we are a new price comparison shopping engine, new but doing very well.

When we first started our IT manager has made a mistake naming our webserver apa1.pricecomparison.com instead of www.pricecomparison.com. Naturally when our owners found out, he was not happy. We had to change the default server name, and I had a feeling as Marketing Director, that this is not good for me in the short run, but may be good in the long run... Well we had to do it anyways.
Poofs... in about 1 week, all my indexed pages on Google are gone... I lost 20% on Yahoo too.... This is not good!!!

I re-analyzed our meta tags, our keywords, our submissions... then two week later I started to see some pages being indexed again.. And the right server name is being indexed www.pricecomparison.com not apa1.pricecomparison.com.
Now about 2 months later we are better of then we were 4 months ago, we are current at PR 4. From this experience I understand that both Google and Yahoo uses actual link URL and server name exactly. Even if it is missing the www, it is considered a different page...

Just my two cents... Hopefully this is useful information for some SEOs.

Andrew
Marketing Director, PriceComparison.com
http://www.PriceComparison.com

[bcyber]

I wouldn't think that server names would matter unless I'm not reading this right. What effect would that have on the 10 bazillion sites on shared hosting servers?