I am the webmaster for a commercial website and we have been a fairly steady #1-#3 in the google SERPS for our targeted keywords for over 3 years. Our google pagerank has been a steady 3. In the last PR update (it was updated for most of my sites a couple of weeks ago), the PR of this site dropped to 0. However, we are still #1 in our targeted keywords. The only changes to the site (besides content) since the last update was as follows. Previously, the site was setup in a subfolder (/catalog/) and we forwarded the root to that folder (non 301). The main URL was PR3 as well as the /catalog/ page. Several of the subpages were PR4. A couple of months ago, we moved the site from the catalog folder into the web root. I placed 301 redirects on the catalog folder to redirect to the web root. We don't solicit links and have done no link building ever. With this site, the links come naturally and we have never had to work at SEO to stay #1 in our market. We simply focus on building a nice site and selling a nice product. I'm not really worried about PR, as search engine traffic is only a small part of our marketing efforts. As long as we don't get dropped out of the SERPS completely, we will barely even notice. Regardless, I am a bit baffled by the PR downgrade. Any guesses as to why PR went to 0 and if this will have any effect at all on anything?
I have also seen some strange PR loss & gains. One site that I am watching seems to be gaining and dropping PR since the latest update. For now I am ignoring it and like you its only the SERP position that really matters. Hopefully there wont be a position loss for you and the PR will bunch back. Have you checked the site using a PR check? Try http://livepr.raketforskning.com/
Data centers 64.233.183.99 and 64.233.183.147 still have it at a 3, but every other one is a 0. Weird.
I saw a number of sites go PR0 after the last PR update. Not a single one lost any rankings. I'm not sure what this means or why they would have gone PR0. Just one more reason to ignore the little green bar. I personally thing that creating a way to see PR was one of the most stupid things Google has ever done. They single handedly created a whole economy around a little green bar.
Wait until next pr update, if it's still 0, then that's the problem of yours. If it's coming back to 3, then that's google's mistake. I don't think google can guarantee everything right.
I think Google has changed the algorithim to some effect since page rank is only dependent only on no of incoming links It has nothing to do with contents of a website
@Freewebspace Actually the quality of links these days is becoming more important than the # of links. Also Google is still using over 200 factors to create the rankings. There will never be one magic bullet. Of course I use dynamite, so I don't need a magic bullet