My main blog (check sig link) is around1 and 1/2 year, and it started as a PR 4 in its first update (last october), and steadily climbed down the PR ladder in subsequent updates, until it hit a solid ZERO in last month's update. With my limited SEO knowledge, I figure this is caused by either/all: 1) the blog was flagged for selling links (I estimate 30%-40% of those posts are sponsored) 2) it was flagged as link farm, since it's a general blog with wide array of topics 3) there's almost 1000 posts, each including at least one outbound link. Even though the blog has gathered a reasonable amount of inbounds, I figure it's not enough to make up for the massive amount of outbound links. So.... while I can't do much about 1) and 2), I could handle 3) by setting the links to nofollow. Do you suppose that would do any good? Can you think of other suggestions?
My blog been slapped by google due to payperpost, and at PR0 more than 3 years. I'm sure you also experience decrease of pr due to selling links right?
I'm not sure outbound links hurt you that much. I've done some studies on this and have had a pr4 survive pr updates and it still is the same. It could obviously be the relevancy of the links going out.
Well, I don't really know... I suspect. Yeah actually that's my main suspicion. I was actually hoping it would be c), so I could do something about it. This blog's pr has been quite flickering over time (4->3->0->2->0). I feel the same, in fact that's how I came up with option b)