SEOmoz's Jane Copland spent months on SEOmoz's 2008 Web 2.0 Awards and I know this because I helped judge the winners. After they ranked well once the awards were announced (and even had a PR7), the PageRank went down seemingly overnight and the website disappeared from the Google index. Completely.
After investigating this with Google, it turns out that the problem was that the URL ended with ".0." There's no explicit statement from Google regarding this issue but the reality is (from extensive testing done on their end and verbal confirmation from Google) that that type of URL becomes an instant penalty.
Forums members express bewilderment. Many are confused as to why the PageRank dropped (one forum member suspects that it was done by hand) and it's a bit strange that a 2 year old page dropped out of the index. While I don't know how SEOmoz is handling that (it wasn't specified in the post written by Jane), I think that Google should use its human quality search folks for reinclusion. But hey, that's just me. After all, if the forum member who says that the PR dropped from 7 to 0 is correct in assessing it was done by a human, it should be possible for Google to revert all these penalties. The page is kosher but the URL structure is "bad." It still is a legitimate page and Google should probably figure out how to distinguish this from other pages. (In other words, its robot should crawl the page and actually make the assessment itself.)
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.
