Recently, like many other bloggers, my pagerank was penalized to zero. Some freak out thinking that a penalization of your pagerank literally means you will lose all your rankings in the search engine. Others have theorized that it simply is a special visible punishment mark for selling links and that you actually maintain your “real” Google pagerank and therefore rankings in the search engine. I can confirm that it is nothing more than a vanity mark because my site was a PR3 after the Google update and then 10 days later it was zeroed, so it appears to have been a penalty. I’m not sure which site specifically caused the PR penalty, but what I do know that my traffic rankings never changed in Google and were better than ever. Later on my PR then jumped to a PR 2 out of nowhere, without doing anything.

So what does this tell me?

Getting punished by Google for selling text link ads does not effect your rankings in the search engine. It is merely for show
to try and discourage people from selling links. What it probably does hurt, is you won’t be passing pagerank from your site. But it PROBABLY doesn’t effect your ability to pass overall link authority to other sites for other factors. Google ranks authority (the same thing that decides your rank in the search engine) of a website on a hundred different factors. Even if Google zeroes out your pagerank, a backlink from a penalized site, still probably has value because of the age of the domain, content, it’s backlinks, etc. You will be passing everything else, but pagerank, which is only a small portion of value in a backlink in Google anyways.