Well this sucks if for real. http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/ went from PR6 yesterday morning to PR3 last night, does anyone still see PR6 as it's been PR3 through the toolbar for almost a day now. I had this happen to a few of my literature sites, but was having SIGNIFICANT server problems at the time and since I never lost SERPs/traffic put it down to the server (did loose traffic due to the server being down). Next PR update was back to normal. Got a new server and for months not had 5 mins of downtime, so if this is real something else is going on. Only one thing comes to mind that could cause a PR penalty. I sell AdSense templates from the site and use those templates on over 50 of my own sites. Footer has a link back to the home page and a link to the actual theme for sale page, so could be all those links backlinks (thousands) have caused a problem. Should have known better, run a test once with a new domain adding over 25,000 backlinks (all from my own sites) over night, 1st PR update hit PR7, but never ranked well and next PR update was PR1 so was banned. Looks like I inadvertently screwed my own site over PR wise ) So far no SERPs/traffic drops and since Toolbar PR is calculated in arrears I should have felt a SERPs penalty over a month ago, but seeing improvements. Still number 3 for adsense templates SERP in Google for example. April almost 300 visitors a day May averaged exactly 400 visitors a day June not enough days for an accurate average, but 420 is what I'm seeing so far (yesterday 450 visitors, day before 475 so looking good). Going to remove a lot of the backlinks from my own sites due to the theme footer and see what happens. Should have titled this post "How to shoot your sites PR in the foot the easy way" BTW I don't worry about stuff like this, I always recover from my own mistakes long term. David Law
This certainly could be a problem. Matt Cutts responded to a discussion about footer links in Wordpress themes. It's the first post on this page - do check the other links he is referencing. This is a slippery slope Google is on. It pits ones right to "sign" their creation with a link to the authors site against Google's desire to eliminate SERP manipulation. Good luck, and BTW your site is showing PR 3 for me as well.
Ouch, a big drop considering you haven't filled your page with links. I can't say i've seen a PR drop like that just because of inbounds. It's generally because of selling links. Google seems to be looking at inbound links much more closely all round, i've seen many sites slammed in the rankings due to inbounds recently. Which is wrong, gone are the days a link to site A from site B couldn't harm site A. I think competitor sabotage is going to take off soon. You have a bunch of PR3 subpages but nothing higher, did they drop also?
Well perhaps having "google" and "adsense" in your URL might be the cause, although probably not sicne you still have a PR. Isn't it against their TOS for adsense?