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Todd - Thanks for your message.  On the bright side - a quick response to my request. Today I received a message back that Google removed the manual penalty for outbound links.  Apparently they agreed with us. Again, many thanks. M

I can no longer reply to this 3+ year old thread since I am not a "pro" member but figured I'd update this topic with an edit, since it is available. First -- It turned out that my analysis, observations and conclusions were correct. While there are a good amount of well intended and quality suggestions, none of the above made any difference and were not the crux of the matter. I cannot and won't disclose the issue here but it was remedied. Second - It was disappointing that, in spite of the fact that I cloaked my domain for the obvious purpose, others did not follow. Instead they used the domain so that it can be indexed by search engines. I hope they can and choose to edit their posts and that a respectful practice here can be maintained. My original response remains below. -------------------------------------------------------------- I do believe that any of these companies can fix your website site. I know that because I have worked with many of them and these are people who get results time and time again....I can tell you most likely they're going to charge you for such assessment it would be in the thousands most likely....Now normally and it's bad practice to guarantee anything in stringent opposition because Google can make a change overnight and nullify everything....I can tell you without a doubt that these guys can fix your site. My website isn't broken.  I do think you're making some assumptions. If SEO was pure cause and effect and my PR is zero everywhere because of something I did wrong per se, then all these SEO companies will be glad when I pay them after my PR returns to a 6.  You are overlooking one big possibility - that some sites just may fall inside the "acceptable margin of error" and nothing you can do will make a dent despite every SEO swearing it will. It may also be a mistake which does happen among a multitude of variables. Hence you have to carefully screen whom you work with and come as prepared as possible so that every dollar goes right into providing the highest ROI. Site owners are responsible for doing their part too. What's disturbing is that this such an extreme PR death penalty that on another very well known site everyone was swearing I MUST be selling links and Google knew it somehow... as that is the penalty. I'm not knocking your host just letting you know that anyone who specializes in WordPress and only WordPress knows a lot more about it than the guys who post everything... now hosted on Zippykid with dual CDN's F5 load balancers, private cloud architecture with a Cisco enterprise-level firewall along with the option for a free optimization every site is optimized by Net DNA or Google engineer designed around the Nginx Web server instead of Apache the amount of memory saved his incredible. It's clear you know a lot about the subject - truly. Ideally, I agree. I'll give it some thought about moving my two dedicated servers but that is a lot of work and $$$. Right now Google has me needlessly chasing a ghost since nobody can point a finger at why I've received a drastic result usually only reserved for the most serious offenders. When we solve that, perhaps we might have money to tinker with perfection. (When I say I have some understanding, I was directly involved in creating and running a site that had to handle 10 billion annual page views. Your suggestions are excellent for fine tuning.)  FTUm Webpagetest just reported that an article loads a page in 2.5 seconds first view and a mere second and a half for repeat. That's quite good. If somebody guarantees that they can fix something on your website in order to make it more search engine friendly that I could see a possible guarantee....I know that unless continuous work is done to keep Google happy essentially campaign then a ongoing relationship that keeps your website to where you are making a positive ROI otherwise it should really not worth it right? Read what you're writing to me here. In your enthusiasm, you keep saying how these companies will fix my problem. From my perspective, that's why on earth Google still has my entire site stuck at a PR 0. What you're saying now is that for a hefty fee of several thousand dollars, someone will fix errors on my site which include many cosmetic ones that I really don't care so much about if they will make a marginal difference. The real problem I have in choosing people to work with is that in this industry (and I'm not saying you), there is a tendency not to take a look at the problem and provide a reasonable estimate. It's about finding one or two items that are technically wrong and then hypothesize to a client why they could need to bill hundreds of work hours just to fix them all because anything is possible, Google obsesses about this and that, etc. I've been looking to invest in a long term relationship doing SEO and very importantly, SEM. But what I needed to know before I speak with anyone is whether (and why) nobody can even remotely identify the major area that resulted in the Google PR death penalty. If most said "I can see that the X area is the one where most of your problems are" then I'd be able to have much more confidence that hiring an SEO who agrees and works on remedying X will provide the best chances for the recovery. As of right now, all I'm hearing is that I need to spend thousands on an assessment and only then I might need to spend many more thousands on a crapshoot to see what works by tidying up everything. That's my hesitation. I'm writing to ask Matt Cutts if Google has a scholarship program, lol. I'll eventually choose one but the fact that there is no concensus at all on some good signs of how 17 years of work was reversed to PR 0 or less in one day is very disconcerting. Want to Improve your Website but don’t know where to Start? _https://yoast.com/hire-us/website-review/_ Regarding your robots.txt I used a tool that pulls any robot text on the website sometimes it's a more than one place for instance somebody can putt two plug-ins that each control the same function robots.txt in this case... I also think the site map is set up incorrectly it should just be simply one index sitemap_index.XML I don't know that you even need one for your form however that's something I would needs more time on. However I would ideally put into the same index. I appreciate all the info. You could be right and will need to rereview it all. FYI, all the robots.txt files are generated by (drum roll please) Joost's Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. It's an amazing tool. The reason for the multiple sitemaps is due to multiple blogs with each one generated by the tool. On the surface, I'm told that there is nothing wrong with that and Google specifically provides you with a tool to submit each sitemap you have. Thanks for the explanation about the robots.txt issue. I don't disagree with you there and am familiar with it. One problem also is that Google doesn't document when it provides data that they know is wrong or, more accurately phrased, not properly identified. For example, much of what you see was an attempt to rid myself of numerous 404s I'd see in Webmaster tools. After wasting months of time someone informed me of a Google rep who explained that Google doesn't necessarily crawl the 404s it reports that it crawled on a recent date. Why this isn't in documentation is beyond me but at least I stopped trying to mess with the robots.txt to try to stop the spider from reporting it spidered successfully non-existent directories. I will send you a private message and the choice is yours I would strongly suggest using one of the companies I suggested. you can also get Yoast to look over your site for $1100 and tell you what's wrong. Joost is awesome. I should have had him do it long ago when he offered me the review at a discount before everything totally exploded for them, lol. I still may contact him and had considered doing. However, I didn't want to waste his valuable time and my money on a report that might only provide him with time to point out all the obvious things I should have seen by expending just a modicum of time. I wanted to get the site cleaned up so that when I hired someone, he/she could use that same block of time to provide a much higher level and useful review. And once I get that high level review, I can use the remaining money on recurring work so that my SEO/SEM is doing the more results oriented work they want to be doing and I, as a client, will feel like I'm really getting good value for the money. As I said, even clients have to get their act together if they want to be able to honestly appraise the value of what their SEO consultant is doing for them. I will do this if you would like please feel free to call me tomorrow I have an appointment at 11 o'clock Eastern time I'm not looking to try to get business trust me however I feel that when people discuss things over the phone they tend to get worked out much faster than any other method. It's always awkward in this position so don't sweat it.  You've given a lot of your time here. I know there is some altruistic motive. There is nothing wrong with hoping to land a client as well who will be appreciative of generosity and willingness to be the first to help reassure that you know you can do the job and prove a little faith on your own time. Thanks again, much appreciated and will also respond to you off-forum as well.