Sudden PR Changes: Cause/Fix?

[crobb305]

I have seen this on a friend's site, during the past 2 days, a drop from PR6 to PR3. Sounds like a manual penalty to me, though I am not sure what triggered it. Maybe selling links? Has anyone encountered one of these sudden drops, and if so was there a solution? Are you stuck with it or does a note to Google help at all? I just thought this seemed odd, because I wasn't aware that manual PageRank changes were taking place on an individual basis.

I have no other details except I see no chnages in rankings that I can tell or the number of minilinks (8 still showing).

[tedster]

At first, such PR drops were definitely manual PR penalties performed as a kind of warning to sites that were selling links for their PR value. Even in those early cases, it was common not to notice any real ranking impact - but when a link-seller's PR drops that can put the hurt on sales.

More recently, we see reports of PR drops (and sometimes bounce-backs, too) in between the major PR Updates. I don't claim to have a good handle on those, and some seem quite mysterious. If rankings and traffic are not affected, I just take them as a data point for future reference and move on.

I certainly have not found any action the webmaster can take to get such a PR drop reversed. I would also appreciate hearing from anyone who has.