Wait for it...........I told you so!
Google has made a major algorithm tweak, and a whole lot of Webmasters are seeing red over it. Page Rank is dropping all over the place, in places people were certain it would stay strong, most notably, directories. Now, in my WHIR blog offering regarding SEO last December, I made a statement about purchasing links and link farms, specifically, it was probably not a good idea, and the results would be uncertain.
Uncertainty is no longer an issue. Directories have taken big PR hits. Blogs (typically those that sell links) have taken a hit as well. Who has come out of this unscathed? Why, those of us who paid attention to the Google endgame - that's who. I've been saying this for the longest time; search engines are most interested in producing results that reflect how the human brain works. They determine relevance through site content. They determine importance through external recognition in the form of links. When you purchase or even just exchange links, you are tainting the part of the algorithm that determines importance. Your site become more important based on how much you spend to make it so.
This is directly in conflict with Google's ranking philosophy. Google doesn't even give a boost to its own advertisers! Why did people think doing SEO in conflict with Google's ranking policies was a good idea?
So, how much was your site affected by the shift? Does your company rely on backlinks from directories, blogs and participatory sites? Did your SEO company sell you on a purchased backlink scheme? I'll bet it worked for a while, and I'll bet that strategy is going fail a little more every day.
For what it's worth, my own Web properties either stayed the same or went up. My personal site was the only when to go down, from PR5 to PR4, but I was getting organic backlinks (people attributing stuff to me within their site content) from a few sources that had sold/exchanged an abnormally large number of links. They went down a few points, which will naturally trickle down to other sites like mine.
If you haven't noticed, I'm not terribly stressed about it. Page rank has much less value than most people give it.
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I'm not sure how to evaluate your statement without knowing the search words for which your site was initially coming up. But I can say the only way you can truly be "damaged" is if you rely on circumstances or techniques for generating higher rankings that are in opposition to how Google develops its ranking mechanisms. If you do, this drop shouldn't be unexpected, and if you don't, the drop should be minimal.
But Page Rank is much less important than people make it out to be. It is one of hundreds of factors that go into deciding the importance of a site (most factors are unknown to the public, myself included), and page rank never has and never will guarantee traffic. If you're using PR as a measurement of your site's success, it's time to go get a new measuring stick!
If your domain name is the same as your search string, and you've been bumped from the #6 spot down into the 400+ area, I have to believe there's something else happening here. A PR rank update should not produce results this dramatic all by itself. There are many reasons a site can be penalized both when it comes to links and internal content. I have to believe there's more to this than PR!