"G" Giveth and "G" Taketh Away...how I lost PR

We've been on-line now for 3 months. Just as I started finding out about PR, I realized we had gone from non-existent in PR to PR1. YEAH! I researched some ways to increase PR and started swapping links. Suddenly, we went from PR1 back to PR0. Why? How?

Can anyone shed some light on why and most importantly how we lost PR? Is there any way for me to find the problem and fix it?

Thanks

 

Here's the problem: PR doesn't mean anything via the toolbar.

Honestly, don't worry about it. Just continue to get links and you'll start to see results in the search engines, which is what really matters.

 

That's true, but if the site is only three months old, and a PR1 was achieved in the recent update, going to 0 outside of an update could mean banned.

 

or that the pr is between 1 and 0 and its fluctuating. I've seen that happen before.

 

Geesh! How do I find out what's going on. Also, every when does G run page rank?

Thanks for sharing your wisdom. Keep it coming!

 

- You know your banned if you do not appear at all in the Google serps, even when searching for your domain name.
- The toolbar pagerank is updated every 3 months. (it was just updated last week)
- Does it actually say pr0 or is it a gray box ? Gray box could also mean that you are banned.

(somebody correct me if i'm wrong)

 

If you're not appearing at all in serps, that could mean that you just aren't indexed yet, but it could also mean you're banned. Gray box means you are banned. It looks like they give white boxes to sites that aren't indexed yet now instead of gray like they used to, so now you can tell the difference.

 

I still don't know why we lost what little rank we had. I wish there was some kind of self eval I could run to tell me where the problem is. We don't have a whole lot of link exchanges, but I've made sure that the ones we do have are quality sites.

However, now that I recall, there is one link exchange I made w/ a PR4 who had a PR0 on their home page (my forward link), but a PR4 on their link page. Because my forward link points to their PR0 page and not their PR4 page, do you think that might be a problem?


Thanks again for everyone's feedback. For now, I'll just continue to participate in a healthy link exchange and

 

That's not the problem. Doesn't matter what PR the pages you link to are, unless they are gray - that would hurt you.