Many sites lost PR in the past update

[miami_agent]

Has anyone noticed that most real estate sites that do "HOME PAGE" link exchange almost all of them lost PR in the last update. Several months ago they were all proud members of PR5+ club now they dropped to PR4 and some even to PR3. It seems like Google made some major changes in assigning PR to the sites that do reciprocal link exchanges. What is your experience with the last PR update?

[VRI]

It's not limited to real estate nor is it related to linking practices. The juice factor was ratcheted up a notch across the board.

[erogers]

The juice factor was ratcheted up a notch across the board.

Yes, you are correct.

[miami_agent]

None of my other sites lost PR, except for real estate related where I have exchanged home page links. In addition there are several discussions on this topic suggesting reciprocal link exchange is getting more and more non efficient way of building link popularity campaign.

Here is the post http://www.webmasterworld.com/link_d...nt/3190790.htm

[fastrealestate]

My internal pages jumped a lot in PR - from 0 to PR5 in some cases. Our iindex remained the same but a couple of our non RE sites took a 1 point hit.

[benmode]

My internal pages jumped a lot in PR - from 0 to PR5 in some cases. Our iindex remained the same but a couple of our non RE sites took a 1 point hit.

The same thing happened to my site.

I must be doing something really good.

[36towns]

You are leaking page rank off of your homepage when you link to other sites. You are leaking page rank even more if those links are site wide. This is a pretty common thing.

[Jay6]

Problem is if you trade links with 10 similar sites and everyone is a PR5 no problem but when some are 3 and 4 your PR goes down. Next time around if you haven't gotten any new links (as your link partners haven't gotten new links as well) all the PR5 will probably from to PR4 while the PR3 may get bumped up to PR4 from all their links to 4's and 5's.

Like in Real Estate you always want to be the cheapest house on the block if your neighbors houses are going down in value, yours probably will as well.

[JennSellsFast]

36 towns, what is a reasonable amount of outlinks on a homepage to retain high PR? any advice?

[36towns]

36 towns, what is a reasonable amount of outlinks on a homepage to retain high PR? any advice?

Hey Jenn, thanks for submission by the way.

On homepage, I wouldn't recommend more than 10, on other pages I wouldn't recommend more than 30. Google says you should keep it under 100 links per page, but that just looks dirty and sometimes loads slow.

My 2 cents....