I was selling tla links, and linking to tla affiliate program in my site. at some point I read that it was a good idea to submit a google sitemap (I do agree with that...) well, I did that... ... just to notice that my site PR then dropped. Some time ago I removed all pages that linked to tla program and requested my pr back. Within a week (or so) they got the rank up (which was cool). I'm not sure, but it might be that since tla site has been penalized for traffic, and since I was linking to that site from my site... my site got penalized (and my sitemap provided google plenty of information ). maybe they spotted it anyway, but I just started thinking if they spotted selling because of sitemaps? (Disclaimer: I reserve the right to be totally wrong on this. This is just pure guesswork & gut feeling, but I thought to share. Anybody else spotted something similar?)