OK, *that* didn't work ...

I wanted to give my web site a bit of a boost in Google, so I installed vbSEO. I hadn't been including the forums in the pre-vbSEO sitemaps, so the next sitemap.xml I generated had about 4,900 entries compared to about 1,100 previously. I uploaded it to the site yesterday, and Google downloaded it today.

And then Google promptly removed ALL of my page rank, on every page. My web pages went from 4 to not ranked (not even 0!).

This seems somewhat sub-optimal. Is this normal and expected?

Page rank is only updated 4 times a year, and frankly, it has basically no value to it at all. I would put this as coincidence only and wouldn't use it as a metric to judge anything on.

Also keep in mind, that the urls with vbseo are 'new'. So, they haven't been ranked yet.

I understand the vbseo url's are new. What is puzzling me is that all of my ordinary non-forum web pages (index, product pages, tutorials, everything) have had their page rank removed, the day after installing vBSEO. I think that may be stretching coincidence a bit.

The honest best thing to do with pagerank, is to uninstall the toolbar/etc that you are using and simply ignore it.

I've seen garbage scrapper sites with 100 hits a day with PR7 and hugely popular forums with PR0. it really means nothing.