I've had great Google rankings for my important key phrases for the past few months now. My home page had a PR 3 and most of my other pages had PR 2 or 3. I think one or two had PR 4. On July 1st, I suddenly lost my Google traffic. This happened at the same time I received a PR 0 for all of my pages. All of my pages now have PR 0 or no PR. What happened ??? My site is basically invisible in Google SERPs now. I don't even rank for my site's name (Instant Poker Money). However, I do have the #1 position for instantpokermoney.com and a search for site:instantpokermoney.com returns almost 4,000 pages. So it seems that my site hasn't been banned from Google. I figure my site received a penalty from Google, but for what? I read about some PR0 penalty which is given to sites in bad neighbourhoods. My external links are to poker rooms and casino sites (most have the nofollow attribute) and I have a links page. I checked all the links on my page and 2 were sites with no or 0 PR. I linked to those sites a long time ago when they had PR. Is that enough to be associated with a bad neighbourhood? BTW, I removed those 2 links yesterday and I only link to quality sites now. The only other reason I can think of is because of my CSS layout. I use empty floating divs and then divs with absolute positioning over them in order to have my page's main content before the header and footer code. I only have a space code in the floating divs, but could Google detect this as hidden text? I've been looking in my Message Center for some reason from Google, but I didn't receive any messages. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as if Google is using that feature as well as they could. Has anybody every encountered such a penalty? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Not sure if this is related to you or not , but take a look , it may shed some light. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=921840
Bunch of authority sites got nailed, pokersourceonline, launch, compatible, and a lot of blogs. Most likely due to link purchasing - good thing your sale didn't go through eh?