Does Google disables PR for sites that have over 200 links per page? Ever since I have been trading links and adding them to my homepage (about 30 quality trades) along with my 72 categories plus other links, my PR vanished 3 weeks after the update, I thought I would have a PR4 instead of a PR3 but it just vanished. Is that why? I'm still excellant in the SERPS... I use to have a PR3 and about 20 PR1's, they are all gone now... Google Guidelines
Trading reciprocal are not natural links and seen as an attempt to manipulate SERPS - hence the removal of your PR. Add rel="nofollow" to your outgoing links if PR is important to you.
I never had a webpage with more than 100+ links, but IMHO i don't really think it could be the reason though
Google might hav got impression that u r selling links or exchanging them for manipulating the SERPs...make them "no follow" or use any java script to prevent their crawling.
No that's not true. I have a site where the home page has over 300 links going out. It is a PR5. If your PR went from 3 to 0 (white bar) it could be that Google thinks you're selling links. So they remove the visible PR to discourage people from buying links from you. It doesn't impact your SERPs because you still have the PR3...google just doesn't show it in the tool bar.
Trading links is against google's policy and hence there is penalization in the form of robbing of PR. Google penalizes only when it suspects that there is link sales. Otherwise, there is no problem at all but the thumb rule is that limit your outgoing links to certain reasonable level, say 100 per page.
A friend of mine recently attended the SMX Convention in California and he was told by Google that they don't like to see more than 75 links on a page, even internal links. They further suggested if you have a text sitemap to break it down into pages of 75 or less. I know this could be hard to swallow, especially if you have thousands of pages. They seem to make us stay busy with changes.
Google always recommend to keep pages not THAT large and with no THAT much outlinks. I feel (because it happends to me once) that pages with more than 100 links get ignored at some point.
I doubt that Google would do this just because one of your pages has such a number of links, however if you haven't been adding the rel nofollow command then you could have been seeping Page Rank without realising it for some time and the last Google update has just reflected this.
Did you do any restructure of your internal site links? It is theoretically possible to leak all your link juice out. Depending on the number of pages in your site and the number of out going links and internal navigation, you might have created a sieve site. LEAKY LEAKY
Google has been having some hiccups, you should probably check it again. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/14/googles-gets-its-own-fail-whale/
That kind of sucks if you have a lot of categories and have a slide out menu with sub categories. I'll tell you, all of these rules and guidelines are a bit asinine. It won't be long before we will have to get on our knees and pray to Lord Google every morning before our site is shown.
Wow.. this is the best answer I've heard... It makes perfect sense... I hope it's true because that would explain why my SERPS are still very good. I thought trading links with other game sites like mine was a good thing, I guess I did it too fast...