Well it seems my site's backlinks jumped up recently and my site appears much higher in the SERP's for targeted keywords, yet my PR just droped from a 5 to a 3. Explain this. Google's a joke.
It will be a penalty because you are openly selling links on your site, it's happened to lots of sites over the last few months. Like you say, SERPS don't seem affected for most sites though.
I do sell links, but not PR, so the drop won't hurt me...infact, my traffic is way up because of the SERP's.
i cant figure out the maths either. my 2 year-old site lost a notch too for absolutely no apparent reason to me. but i'm just one tiny person...
PR and SERPs aren't as tightly coupled as they used to be 5 years ago. Now the SERPs rely more on related links and anchor text and less on PR of your pages. Unless you're selling links then don't even worry about PR. Just be happy you're getting more traffic.
Ad do sell ad space, which might be the reason for the PR drop, but SERP's improved, so I will continue not to worry about it. And I just reported Google to Google for selling links. ...and my comments to Google were: "Am I wrong?"
PR has nothing to do with SERPs. Some times, google changes the PR as a penalty. For example, if your site have paid links, then google will penalize your site's PR. Also, if your site is new, then PR can fluctuate a little. How old is your site?
I have several PR pages on my site that are number one in google, yet there are other sites with higher pr that are much lower
good one well, maybe your PR drop is a temporary situation. i have a newly-regged domain with no backlink at all updated to PR 2. no clue how it is done.
maybe you should stop selling links if google knows that you do this...and maybe resume again in a few months? and this time don't do it so blatently
They're right because of two things. First, the PageRank score you see in the Toolbar is a snapshot taken at the time of the last update, which can be 3-4 months old, and Google updates their internal PageRank data continuously as they crawl the web. Second, Google's internal PageRank scale is much broader than the 0-10 integer scale of the Toolbar, and Google occasionally has to remap the relative values between their internal PageRank and the Toolbar PageRank to account for the growth of the Web. This means that the link value that might have earned you a Toolbar PageRank of 5 in the past, may only be shown as a Toolbar PageRank score of 3 today.
I sell "sponsorship" links to keep SearchBliss going...and help feed my family. I don't believe it is "blatent", and if my SERP's are fine, why stop?
If you are doing good on SERPS than don't worry about pr. People like higher pr sites because they think they are worth more but if you are already making money than don't worry about it
FYI: Buying Links is against Google TOS unless you're links are nofollowed so you're sites are penalized i guess.
If your site appears higher in the serp's that's much more important that having a higher pr, you should be happy
PAGERANK DOES NOT MATTER! You obviously havnt figured it out yet? there is no joke. PAGERANK is bull.. its just scale of links you have. Google updated the required links thats, (Basically made it even harder to get a higher pagerank)