Does Google penalize changes in WHOIS

Change to WHOIS

[ChrisKeen]

My site has taken a steep dive in SERPS. It celebrates it's first year of existance today with this dive. We previously where page one, number one, for almost all of our keywords, now we are one page 19 or further behind.

There were a couple of changes. First, when I renewed the domain registration, I made it a "private" registration with the registrar. Second, we have been doing a "link exchange" with a couple of dozen completely unrelated sites.

I did notice today that PR went from 3 to 0.

Any ideas of what happened? Or should I sit it out?

Thanks for any input.

[birdstuff]

My guess is Google has marked your site as a link farm.