My guess is that your site, being quite prominent, has been tagged with a penalty for selling text links. Here’s an article by Danny Sullivan that confirms that Google is doing this as a way to discourage search engine manipulation by devaluing paid links.

Colin McDougall here, I don’t really give a darn about Google PageRank (OK, yeah I do a bit but not much)

What I saw on the week-end was a drop from number 2 to 4 on the keyword credit card applications (Is it OK to mention specifics here???)

But saw that my traffic is actually way up on long tail search terms.

If you have dropped in rankings then consider what you have been doing to promote your site lately and do less of that.

What I have focussed on over the last 3 years is focus on branding a site and then these fluctuations in the Google algo matter less and less.

A little motivation for all reading this:

Do not panic – Do not get off track – Stay positive

I have seen my rankings plummet over night many times over the last 6 years and I have yet to return to the corporate world. In fact these fluctuations always ending earning me waaaaay more in the end.

Remember, Google have humans and humans make mistakes.

Action plan for those affected:

Produce more great quality content weather it be written, audio, images or videos

PS. That’s a hint to those that only have text on their site

I was recently penalised for having paid links on my blog, and not having rel=”nofollow” in the link code. It’s something I think you need to be wary of.

My Google search positions plummeted and you can read how I reversed the penalty on my blog.

I hope your PR decline is temporary.