New grey bar in pagerank

Penalty or new index

[okephoto]

We have about 30 related sites (no duplicate content) that were all developed within the past 10 weeks. Many of these were spidered quickly and the result for the past month was pageranks in the 4 to 5 range with many internal pages in the 3 to 4 range. As a result we have done reasonably well with sales until the last update.

We have now watched almost every site drop to a pagerank of 0 with most internal pages showing a grey bar (not indexed?). There is some internal linking between sites but certainly not a huge amount and many of the sites have many external links as well.

One major change that has happened is that the host made some changes on the servers and all the sites now have the same IP address. This is somewhat beyond our control without changing to a new host and dramatically increasing our costs.

I'm hoping this may just be temporary glitch as from reading many of these threads it appears as if the latest update has dropped many relatively new sites.

Do we just hang in there and wait or at what point do you start trying to figure out what changes may need to be made to do well again.

Thanks

[SilentPartner]

Although the SERPS for nearly all of the domains that I consult on, manage, or am otherwise involved with have not taken a big hit this last month ( secondary key terms average loss of about two places in the search engine results, no change in the #1 listings holding strong ), I've actually had to start sending clients to Fast Technologies to search.

It's insane being on the telephone advising a client to search on google to locate needed information, and fifteen minutes later still waiting for them to find the information.

Across the board I've received personal complaints about search engine results of late; I spent about 14 hours daily dealing with such things professionally, through my own private business dealings, and with my own family of websites.

Trying to find a Widget contractor in "this city" has been nearly impossible ( as an example ). Endless directory listings, newspaper articles, and spam.

I'm not knocking google, as I understand that spam filters will be re-integrated and other key implementations have yet to be applied.

However, it is interesting to note that the google SERPS have effected the productivity of the company I work for ( my day job, so to speak ).

I think google needs to carefully consider the balance between PR, backlinks, and real content. My optimization methods rely more on site architecture methods and content management than backlinks and PR; this considered, the sites that have followed my recommendations have done just fine through these changes. These are not always easy methods to successfully use when the SEO world knows how to leverage SERPS with back links, and has the domain power structure ( many domains with high PR ) to leverage results simply with the power of links, but it can be done with good content writing and design, and natural links.

However, I realize that in the highly competitive industries, everything must be aggressively leveraged. I've noticed that change in backlinks and SPAM are largely responsible for the shift in SERPS, and that the shifts in google search results are more significant in competitive areas.

I do hope that google finishes rolling everything out quickly, as I enjoy supporting them. When I have to advise one client to switch search engines, this potentially filters out to hundreds of individuals in a very short period of time.

- Jason
//edit: [ my apologies to the moderators, this thread apparently changed while I was posting to it, not certain why! ]