PR5 to PR 0. Anyone know why?

Our site vbuddy.com used to have PR5 on Google for the longest time. However, in the past month or so it has dropped to 0.

I can only assume it's being punished somehow. Can anyone here figure out why this might be the case?

I have a few guesses:

1. Invalid robots.txt. By default the site is returning 200 instead of 404 when non-valid pages are found. The script is being fixed to address this problem. Would this affect it?

2. Many network pages have content quoted from the real sites. I would give you guys a link, but the forum rules don't allow me to add a URL. I'm too new. Just go to vbuddy and click "browse" then "networks" to see the network pages.

For instance, the network site for serverpro.com has info in the "about" section that's copied from the real site. I'm guessing Google thinks it's duplicate content?

Ok, so assuming it might be #2 that's the problem, I've thought of two ways to fix it.

One is remove all the "about" sections from the network pages. This will remove valuable content though, and I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

Two is blocking the search engines from spidering the network pages. This would be bad from an SEO perspective as these pages would all drop off the face of the planet.

So what are your suggestions?

Hi Barona,

Google still index 17,300 pages from your site so you aren't "banned".

It could be a page rank error/problem... The obvious question is how has your Google traffic been affected?

As for your points:
1. Invalid robots.txt.. how?
1(a): A 404 page returning a 200 header code is a bad thing. It will return multiple urls (any broken links to / on your domain) with 100% duplicate content.
2. If you're copying content and serving it up on your domain, it IS duplicate content!
I would either add some unique content to those pages or use robots.txt to remove them stop G from spidering them (it won't remove them from the Google index if they have sufficient incoming links).

Well the Google traffic hasn't been affected much, since the new site just went live about a month or so ago.

The robots.txt was invalid because the site was returning code 200 on all pages (even pages that should be 404), and sending the user to a "page not found" custom page. I'm working with the programmer to correct this error.

The content is basically just a brief "about us" that's quoted from the real website. It's in the form of something like vbuddy.com/serverpro.com.

The "about" portion is really meant only to introduce the company briefly, not to plagiarize the site. I see many other sites like alexa.com do this (auto-spidering).

I'd like some advice on this. Should I remove all of the "about us" content and hopefully get back the PR5? Or should I keep it as is now? Daily links from Google is picking up, but it's still at under 100 a day.

One other thing is, the site is geared toward webmasters. If a webmaster sees vBuddy as having PR0, would they be more hesitant to set up their company network site on there?

What do you mean by "new site?" Are you using a dropped domain? Have you switched the site theme? If any of this has ocurred, then that would explain the PR loss.

As long as your rankings remain stable, don't worry about it and continue building your business. Visual PR is not everything, but it will come in time.

That also happened to one of my sites last week

It dropped from PR3 to P0. I think the reason is because I had a casino paid link on my homepage.

I removed it

Did your site's PR come back up afterwards?