Over the past couple of weeks Google has carried some updates with a back link export and an update to the Google Toolbar PR. Both of these updates have had an effect on the DirectoryContest.com most significantly in the past week.

On the 24th we posted up the DirectoryContest.com results with an all time high of over 501,000 results returned for the keyphrase “directorycontest.com”. Shortly thereafter the results took a bit of a nose dive.

Over the following days at an almost hourly interval the total number of results dropped steadily downwards to 455,000. At first it seemed like Google was carrying out some kind of roll back to the updates they had been carrying out, but it then became apparent what had really happened.

As people began flocking to forums to ask the age old question ‘Why has my PR dropped?’ the penny dropped so to speak, and what really happened is that a majority of the worthless entries into the competition had been removed from the results.

This included a variety of web sites from those that had recently registered domains for entry into this particular competition, to those who had blogged about the “seo contest” in the hopes that they could win it. They had obviously missed the part about the web site needing to be a directory in order to qualify for a prize!

A few days after the updates had finished and the results have started to rise again, at the time of posting we are now back up to 484,000 and rising daily.

Stumble it!