Hi all,

I have had the strangest thing happen; pagerank on one of my sites updated from 3 to 4 in the last update but the site got a penalty at the same time losing rank on my most important keyword from position 3 to 67!

I suspect that it can't be a penalty for my incoming links otherwise my PR wouldn't be up. I have lowered my keyword density because it might have been a little to high on the other hand (stuffed )

Does anybody know how long a penalty can/may last?

Penalties, real ones, last forever.. Or until you fix the cause of the penalty and beg to be reincluded..

But, just because your pagerank went up does not mean that your ranking can not go down..

That might be because of ranking update, if all the things are fine there at your site then you will get your ranking back soon. Once submit your site in google webmaster tool.

You can't really worry about stuff like that. If you're not doing something wrong, they will eventually go back into place. Don't expect it to happen overnight. Some of my keywords have done that to me, but they go back awhile. It may have something to do with your backlinks. Sometimes after getting new backlinks, it puts the page back further in the index and then recalculates it.

Speaking of penalties, a site of mine went from Page Rank 3 to Page Rank 0 without any warning or reason. Is this a penalty or could the site just have been down when the ranks got updated?

Loss of rankings doesn't necessarily mean penalties! Rankings go up and down all the time - naturally.

Can I ask where you got the idea that ranking fluctuations mean that you are being penalised?

There is no corelation between pagerank and getting a penalty.
Goodluck with getting out of the penalty!

My blog was penalized last December and I guess they
haven't lifted it yet.

what are the main reasons for penalties?

@ Gringo: I know that the site has a penalty because when I type in the url of the page it's listed on page 3 of Google. I usually have a natural nr1 poistion on my exaxt url

Thanks all!

Page Rank does not mean your site is not penalized. In fact, it means nothing at all.

Is your site new? Many new sites rank well their first week or two, then drop way down and then slowly but steadily crawl back up to that initial position.

Don't get too concerned about your pagerank. Ranking is even more important. If your SERP remains the same, there's nothing to worry about.

Still PR is considered as authenticity and you need to have higher PR's if you want to have link exchange or if you are looking for higher rankings(incoming links are a part of optimizing your website and is also necessary to get higher rankings.)