What Causes Page Rank Drop and Promotion?

The "Update" has occured, by the looks of many posts here on DP this week on the subject.

I'm very curious as to what causes websites to drop and rise in position, especially after reading so many of the posts regarding this mystery.
I've sold links (less than 10 on a page), and got demoted a position on one site.....did nothing on another new forum software that raised from zero to 3 overnight.

Friends tell me they sell links like crazy and haven't moved an inch in years.

Does the formula have to do with SEO in any way?
Backlinks that are inbound only versus outbound only versus reciprocal?
Does stale content (not updated in years) have anything to do with the process?

Or, better yet- perhaps the distinction within Google is one that nobody but their engineers know for sure and are sworn to secrecy.
Mystifying, to say the least.

Any "theories" on this perplexing algorithm?

 

Selling links is a surefire way to lower your PR

 

It's because any outbound one way links that you place on your website will leak PR juice and pass on to the other sites. Google nowadays can even differentiate whether those are paid links in the first place, so if they do, your site will get penalized for sellling links.

 

Did you building your links now a days? PR juice might be spreading among your outbound links.

 

it seems PR is solely determined on backlinks and where those backlinks come from.

 

No PR is solely determined by a person named Google... no algorithm, no nothing .. just Google

 

I think there are lots of website who got a DROPDOWN on their PR. We must have a brief discussions on what was similar to each of us so that we can figure out why we had a PR dropdown.

 

Surely inbound and outbound backlinks are the main cause of PR drop or PR raise, try to generate as many as possible inbound links but only from high pr sites with minimum PR2 which will definitely increase your page rank while outbound links from your site play a role in decline of PR.

 

So, PR completely depends upon inbound baclinks. ?
I do not agree

 

I read that some sites submitting to many "junk" directories had their PR lowered as a 'punishment'. Anyone heard similar?

 

It completely depends upon inbound backlinks...

It's still a mathematical algorithm

 

Thats is true is some cases

 

keep exchanging links acquire more quality links you will regain pr

 

Just keep on building inbound links from high ranking sites and see the difference.

Link exchange is only worth when your site has less pr and also less no of pages then site where u going to exchange link. Or vice versa may decline your PR.

 

If this was true i could spend days submitting my competitors website to junk directories and other crappy sites to lower their pr. I can't see this happening. If you acquire a lot of high quality backlinks your pr will rise.

 

There are many reasons why a PR can drop, like if a site sell links, or have lost some backlinks etc

To gain PR, you need to build backlinks.

 

It was Jerry West who said it

 

Make it easy for you...

Have good, updated content and you will not face any PR drop.

 

i heard it was asking questions about toolbar pagerank on DP that was the cause of it

 

pr is completely based on incoming links, get more of those, and your pr will raise.. add more outgoing links and your pr might drop