PR Update, or Penalty?

I have a friend with an arcade site, and his PR has gone from a 6, down to a 4 and within the last week down to a 3(for sure, 100%, I saw it at a 4 just last week and pointed the drop out to him). Does Google manually adjust PR for any reason? He has sold a few links, such a yearly position for a set fee; could this be the cause, did Google catch on and penalize him? It's worth adding that this site isn't small, in fact it gets about 8k visits a day.

I'm very curious to know what's going on here, PR update, Penalty/why, any info would be greatly appreciated.

 

mostly likely it is penalty...just my personal opinion..

 

As there aren't any public update yet, then I will have to agree with xc

 

Yes, G can apply a manual penalty if they stumble across it or someone informs them.

 

This would have to be a penalty unless the update is coming now then it could be because a large number of sites stopped linking to your friend.

 

Penalty. Or maybe because few links from another sites are turned down.

 

in my opinion it is not penalty or pr update, your friend arcade site is lose PR because he sold a links. He gave his PR juice to the website that he sold for.

 

it may b due to penality,... even many top sites loosing its PR..

and also if u sell links on your site.. Google may penalize

 

If link juice is passed away to other sites, the PR will be affected because of this dilution of link juice, only during a PR update. Since there has not been any update over the past few months, its got to be a penalty.

The penalty need not be manually applied by Google. It's algo can detect paid links and automatically penalize those sites that sell links.

 

i think there has not been a PR update from so Long!!!

So it might be penalty

 

ys its penalty, pr update not came yet

 

Thanks for mentioning that bit, those were my exact thoughts. I assume it has to be a penalty because of this as well. Even if he is losing links from sources, and is passing link juice elsewhere, the PR update hasn't happened yet, so that wouldn't show. If he's dropped from a 6 to a 4, then weeks later from a 4 to a 3, it's got to be something along the lines of a penalty, either that or a very screwy glitch, which is highly unlikely.

 

It is probably a penalty. We have seen those kind of PR drops in the past.