Drop in PR and major drop in traffic?

[Rocky Moore]

Recently I noticed a drop in traffic from Google to my site www.HintsAndTips.com and also noticed that it dropped from a PR5 to a PR4. Browsing the logs I find that there was a major drop in traffic from Google to the tune of about 75% which started right around the first of the October.

Digging in the logs showed that key words that were providing traffic previously, no longer bring traffic from Google. One example was the combination: "flush dns". They drop from 57 visits last month (and about that many each month since the tip about it was posted) to zero traffic from Google on on those keywords. Browsing many of Google's result pages based on on those keywords, I could not find my site referrenced.

No changes have been made to the site that I can think of which could have caused problems (at least during the last month).

Is this just typical and I should expect this often or is this something new?

[Visarts]

Had the same thing happen to one of my sites - domainofmusic.com
Went from 5-4, with all sub pages at 4.

I wouldn't really worry at all - if you had gone from
a 6 to a 5, I would be seriously worried - there's a relatively
small difference from a 4 to a 5 (4 is 3790, 5 is 22680)
but a huge leap from 5 to 6 (22680 to 136500 - PR is exponential).

What did I do? I took my site out of frames, optimized
as many of the main pages as I possibly could,
updated all of my keywords and meta info, interlinked
all of the main pages, and submitted my site to as
many of the top 20 sites under 'classical music' as
I could. Now I just have to wait, but it shouldn't
take much longer than a few months

And yes, in answer to your question - do expect fluctuations from time to time, but the best tip I can give you, is to update your content and your site overall as much as you possibly can. Google loves fresh,
relevant content, but WILL (notice the absense of the
word 'may') lower the visibility of static sites.
This is what happened with Domainofmusic.com - I hadn't done anything with the site in 3 months, and
if I actually made any money off of that project, it would be seriously bad for business.

[Rocky Moore]

Yeah, the PR is not that important to me, it was the reduction in traffic by 75% that is problem. Now, Google is only generating five times as much traffic as msn search ;)