As I posted in another thread, my site dropped from pr3 to zero about a week ago and it hasn’t budged. I’ve been digging around the seo forums and the buzz is that sites linking out to irrelevant sitesf or link exchange or are suspected of purchasing one way links are being HEAVILY penalized. When I first launched, I did some of these exchanges with pretty much any site willing to give me a back link, not knowing any better. I subscribe to Link Machine, Link Metro and Link Market, and even though for at least 8 months now I have only swapped with other gambling related sites, I still have some old links up that I checked by hand to be sure they were still linking back and to make sure they weren’t a ‘bad neighborhood’ i.e. link farm, but are nonetheless are irrelevant. I’m thinking this may be the culprit.
IBP, the second most popular and IMHO most powerful seo software, has also had their pages downgraded to zero and also the pages at WebCEO.com
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/feed/
Guess it’s time for me to optimize for Y or MSN!!