The blogging world is cursing the big "G" and scratching their heads as their Google pagerank has suddenly taken a turn for the worse.
Not unlike a stock market tumble, this change caught everyone off guard and has left many bloggers and content-based sites wondering what they did wrong.
The pagerank algorithm has been a supposed indicator of the authority and value that Google has placed on a web page. On a scale of zero to ten, a ten is the most coveted, with only a handful of sites receiving this level of honor.
But even pagerank of 8 or 9 is incredibly difficult to come by, with most webmasters thrilled to have a PR 6 or 7 for their site. Even a PR 4 or 5 would be a huge step up for many new bloggers.
I first heard about this from my friend, Dave Taylor, whose blog took a steep drop from PR 6 to PR 4.
Among other high-profile sites that got spanked with this latest change are Darren Rowse's Problogger.net, Engadget, Search Engine Roundtable, Forbes.com and The Washington Post.
It is suspected that paid links, such as those offered by Text Link Ads, could be one cause of a site being penalized.
But some sites that got hit didn't accept paid links, so perhaps there are other factors. It could be that Google is looking at the quality of incoming links in attempting to determine whether a site has true value or not.
I find this hard to comprehend as some top-quality sites were targeted for pagerank demotion.
The discussion and debate is rampant on webmaster sites, with all kinds of speculation taking place.
So it is truly a mystery at the moment.
But I can say this.
Google does what Google wants.
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