Front page dropped to PR1 - thoughts?

[ufmedia]

The front page of our site dropped in late March from PR4 to PR1.  Yes, I know toolbar PR isn't terribly reliable, isn't much of an indicator of overall SEO, etc. - however, upper management will want to know what happened and what is being done to fix it.

Of course, the answer is obvious: go build links.  But what might the cause be?  As I mentioned in a past Q&A, the site is entirely encrypted and as a result may be causing us to leak some juice (http backlinks of course make up the vast majority of our links).  We're planning to fix this once the site is ported over to a CMS, but that's still months off.  Other than that, what might be the problem?  Any ideas?

[alhallinan]

I'm pretty sure this is the domino effect.

Google's Panda update made content farms lose Page Rank.  Therefore, outgoing Page Rank was reduced from the content farms.  A lot of us had a ton of links from content farms, which were then devalued as well.  Voilà, Page Rank reduced.

[PDubLasVegas]

Yeah, I'd have to agree with Andrew.  Same thing happened to us!

[ufmedia]

I gave that a good deal of consideration. The drop didn't actually occur until late March.  The update was reported on February 24, and as of a day later we had not yet seen the PR drop.  However, as some webmasters complained they got unfairly penalized, I went back and revisited our organic traffic.  Before and after the update was reported on February 24, we experienced a post-Farmer drop of less than 4 percent for non-branded traffic.  Overall our Google organic traffic actually increased by nearly 30 percent.  In addition, we don't really have any article links (this site is just now getting optimized).  So I just don’t see that we got Farmerslapped.  However, I'm happy to be proven wrong, so do you recommend other ways of detecting?

[FrankWickers]

Another idea that you need to examine... the company hasn't bought any links, or become involved with what might be considered 'Black Hat' SEO, has it?

I say this only because if any Black Hat SEO occurred, and Google slightly caught on to it, they might have intentionally lowered your toolbar PageRank to send you a message before taking any sort of direct action.

[ufmedia]

@Frank: As to paid links, I highly doubt it.  My supervisors and I are pretty militant against black hat, and I know I haven't bought any links.  I can run another backlink report tonight, but it's not likely we'll find any.  I have found a handful (i.e. not even half a dozen) random links that appear highly spammy, but they aren't on interrelated sites/link neighborhoods, so I don't think that's the issue.