Why do you think the PR went down? Did you have a lot of AdSense or affiliate ads? Affiliate text links? Not enough backlinks? Too many? From the wrong types of sites? No new content in a while? No new content at all? What are your reasons?
Not many people are going to know why this happened, its almost impossible to tell. You could have lost PR due to your backlink's backlinks being penalized for selling text links. You'll just never know, adapt and move on is my answer.
Mine actually went up, from N/A to 5. I just wondered if there was something I should avoid doing Plus I'm curious what I DID do, if anything, to get that, or if it was just sort of random...
To the ones that went up not sure why the PR went up on them! And for the ones went down, I am not sure why they went down! Big G is big Mystery to me!
Sites that have build their links with accent on directories links have been affected with PR drop, cause most of directories suffered PR penalty
Some of my sites went up, and some went down with it's PR. If I could to try make any guess why, then I can say that if a site got new links in last couple of months (two or three) went up. Sites without any update and without new backlinks, went down (one of them even from PR3 to PR1). So, maybe value of backlinks decease with time? Maybe it is to early to set it as a new PR theory, but this is just my suspicion.
My thoughts on this: Sites selling links get penalised. Sites getting links from those sites are also penalised. But how does google know if a site sells links?
Very interesting thought. It would explain most of the changes I've seen on my sites. Maybe a combination of this and random.
why does everyone even worry about pagerank. it does basically nothing to increase traffic anymore. google has almost abandoned its use completely.
But I thought that Google understood that you can not control who links to you. So, if I wanted to take down the competition, all I would have to do is post their link on a blog network? See, that's treading in dangerous territory if that's the case in penalizing those links.
I saw many sites that PR went down because they sell text links. I also notice that links from directory are discounted a lot.
I can understand such links being worthless, but actually dropping a site's PR because of that? That seems somewhat psychotic.