fathom - 7:11 am on Nov 3, 2002 (gmt 0)

our site is down 1 pr across the board. we have also noticed many other sites down from 1-2 pr.we lost abour 50 links to our site. On the good side we moved up in all the kw searches.

See... PR and SERPs are not really related.

A main site of mine was down during googlebots deep crawl (about a week).

Transferred to a new host, and googlebot continued but obviously it would have unindexed many pages that would have counted as backlinks, allowed internal PR transfer, and outbound links to other company owned domain.

PR dropped PR7 >> PR6 -- all sites and many internal pages showing PR1 - PR3 where they all had PR4 and above.

Traffic has increased though, and suspect SERP's did to on many, but didn't bother checking much since the cause was "rather known".

PR can make the difference but it's not the most important consideration.

I think rfgdxm1 has a good point. PR hasn't got stricter, Google's knowledge of it's "know" www has grown, therefore unless you manage new links (or PR on existing links increases) at the rate Google's archive increases your current PR will depreciate over time.