so i have a website, A, that i was fortunate enough to get some nice PR8/9 links to it write off the bat this boosted A to a PR5 i then created 3 more sites, B C and D, and cross-linked them all with A thus, B C and D now are PR6 the funny thing is, A is (seemingly) dropping to PR4 A has some 40,000 pages indexed, while B C and D have maybe 25 combined what do you think is happening? am i being punished for having too many pages indexed so quickly?
Are sites B, C, & D related in any way to site A? By related, I'm referring to the topics each site covers. If they are totally unrelated and you're trying to pass on PR from a high PR'd site to those not related, the SE's will catch on to this and devalue those links to little or nothing. It can also lead to site A's PR dropping as well. It could in fact be that you obtained too many links in such a short time.
It depends on how you cross link your sites. Are you passing authority back to A from B, C and D? Are you cross linking B, C and D? How many outbound links do you have on A? Do you have inbound links to B, C and D from sources other than A? There are a lot of factors that come into play here.
Unless G has seriously modified their PR algorithm the semantic relationships of pages linked together should not effect PR.
all the sites share the same footer, which contains links to A, B, C and D there are only a handful of outbound links (excluding ones to B, C, D) only links (that i know of) pointing to B, C and D are from A what i dont get is that A, the main site that is directly linked to the PR8/9, is a PR4/5, while B, C and D are PR6 each
You could but no reason to. What you also forget is other sites link into your pages and as such add PR value....so while A is passing a lower value to a page with a higher PR there could be outside factors at play. Another issue is the time frame it takes Google to recognize and count the value of links.