PR Lost, From 4 to 0

[bongkph]

I just noticed recently that my PR dropped from 4 to 0. This happened on my main site www.domain.com, but sudomains like www.domain.com/blogs is not affected and still having the same PR. I have read so many articles and forum discussion but still could not find the answer. I never sell links on my site. I do submit articles and RSS occasionally.

Currently my GWT is setup with a domain.com and www.domain.com. The www.domain.com currently shows "No data available" in the Links To Your Site. The domain.com shows 14,500 links but most of it are onsite links.

Also read few months ago that 301 may be the cause of lost of PR. I have this on my htaccess:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\ /index\.htm
RewriteRule ^index\.htm$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]

This was added to redirect my old html site index page. What could be the cause of this PR lost? Please help

[edited by: tedster at 12:51 am (utc) on Dec 27, 2010]
[edit reason] turn off the auto-link for the htaccess code [/edit]

[tedster]

Which page was PR 4 and is now showing PR 0 on the toolbar - the one with or without the "www"? I'm thinking you may have seen "4" on the version that is now redirected, and you won't see that PR displayed on the toolbar until newPR values are exported. That only happens a few times a year.

Also, has your search traffic to the home page dropped?

[Lame_Wolf]

If it is the site I am thinking of, your homepage is not cached. Plus the content is found on other sites.

[bongkph]

@Tedster, both (with or without www)shows PR0. There is no drastic drop on the homepage traffic and visitors from organic search usually arrives on my articles. But overall, there is about 30% decrease in traffic.

@Lame_Wolf, using G search, I can view the cache page of my www.domain.com, so I think the homepage is cached? My contents are located on the same site.

[tedster]

There is no drastic drop on the homepage traffic and visitors from organic search usually arrives on my articles. But overall, there is about 30% decrease in traffic.

That is an issue worth pursuing - don't worry about toolbar PR. For one thing you usually cannot find anything actionable from the toolbar information. One exception might be that Google has often knocked the toolbar down to zero (gray bar,not white bar) if they suspect the site is selling links that pass Page Rank.

But with regard to the traffic loss, can you pinpoint a time when it fell off all at once, or has it been gradual?

[bongkph]

PR is back but traffic remains. I suspect it was not the reason for traffic loss but rather the recent Google updates. Also found that some of the articles who are previously on no.1 spot of search results are now down to 3 and so on.