Pagerank phenomenon or just penalty

[alexo]

Hello,

A 7 year old rich content site dropped from PR5 to grey bar!

What can this mean?

Link:www.domain.com or link:domain.com 0 result
site:www.domain.com 22000 results

Also, check google webmasters tool -> it's showing 5k backlinks, but when i click - NO result.

Results from Yahoo:33k backlinks

Domain also listed in few dmoz, Google's dir, yahoo, wikipedia (~50-100 pages).

During last month the owners of the site don't change anything on their site (just update it and minor changes). The only thing is -> before this PR last update (nov.2008), site was down 1 day (but i don't think that i can be the real reason).

Site still geting minor traffic from google.

So, what is this?
Is it "just a temporary problem"; "temporary glich in Google" or this is PENALTY?

thx

[night707]

reads like severe penalty after manual review.

[conor]

Check the cache and server for malware attcks

[alexo]

>> Check the cache and server for malware attcks
as i know, there wasn't any malware attcks, the only think that site owner said, that 3 weeks ago, they find a lot of spam link on the forum (a lot of #*$!o images and links). 3 -4 weeks ago spam was deleted from their forum (forum isn't so much active, that why they don't know about spam 2-3 months).

do you think that spam can be the reason of such penalty?

[trillianjedi]

they find a lot of spam link on the forum

That can definitely cause problems (although no guarantee that was the problem). You are what you link to...

Out of interest, were the forum links no-followed?

[alexo]

>>>Out of interest, were the forum links no-followed?

Unfortunately don't remember