Egon Yeah, AutomoBlog.net went from PR5 to PR3. I wonder how this is going to affect advertisers. Come on Google, let us know what’s going on.

Keith Dsouza It really should not affect most of the SERP’s but Google or atleast Matt Cutts should make an annoucment on what the hell is going on.

Venomous Kate My PR5 blog went down to a 3 overnight. My PR4 blog went to a 3 last week and is now down to a 2. Granted, since I do sponsored reviews I expected a little bit of a drop but nothing like this. If Google are doing this to protect their Adsense revenues from competitors like TLA, then I think it’s safe to say Google has repositioned from being a search engine to being more of a corporate sponsor. As for me, I just sold off my Google shares. No, I don’t think it’s going to hurt them, but it felt better than slamming my head against my keyboard all morning. Made a nifty little profit, too. I’m going shopping.

Cigar Jack I got hit and dropped from a 4 to a 2.

Ashish Mohta I have small guess, Not sure but possibly Google can find when you were linked and In how much time for a particular article…If they find high amount of linking all of a sudden. They can go for manual check If you made a good story and true find…its not considered as positive linking. But if you did by giving money or creating useless competition that can create a problem I know one thing for sure that Google have both auto and manual check. They should be having some script to find sudden linking and then find exact nature with manual. Do correct me If I am wrong.

Court I have now been hit with a -2 and I’m not selling links and I’m not part of a blog network. Is it possible that Google is going to hit all blogs? If so I think it’s very odd and stupid. If not, there isn’t any reason to penalize my site.

Technobuzz.net oh! my god! thats so bad.

Daniel Harrison Just wondering, it might be due to the quality of directory and blog links being downgraded, and therefore sites with PR based on those have been hit.

Daniel Harrison I noticed my Spy Gadget Blog dropped PR5 to PR3. My directories have dropped 2 points too.

Karthik I don’t think any of you would complain if you heard of Google’s woes. Google doesn’t rank for “search engine” on google.com! How about that for being ironic?

Vincent Chow Now I don’t feel as bad for my PageRank drop from 5 to 4.

JoeTech.com Wow… Some of those sites took a big hit. What really matters is the fact that these sites will undoubtedly lose a lot of search engine traffic. I’m just glad I’m still holding my PR5.

Daniel Easton, yeah I checked you guys and it was fine. Gawker media, Crunch Network and GigaOM seem to be fine as well.

Easton Ellsworth Know More Media has about 100 interlinking blogs and our PageRanks appear not to have changed – nearly all 6’s across the board for the blogs’ home pages.

Jerry Its really sad to know that all the hardwork can be taken away by the “all mighty google” .The just wanna show how powerful n controlling the can be. Mine is has a PR 0 and am still alive and kicking!Don’t lose your sleep..

Stephen As a resident voice on SEO, I can’t help but weigh in on this one. My working theory isn’t that all of these sites have necessarily been penalized, especially considering many of them are doing nothing wrong. Rather, I believe that the sites linking to them have been largely devalued. Consider this: The primary audience for many of these sites are bloggers. These sites derive their popularity from others who are quite likely being penalized. Now that the algorithm has been changed and all those links have lost their juice, the popular blogging niche sites are losing PageRank as a byproduct. It’s regrettable, but largely unavoidable. I’ll keep everyone apprised if I come across a better explanation, but that’s the best I’ve got for now. Honestly, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher, but this is why it’s never advisable to put all your eggs into the Google basket.

Paula Neal Mooney JohnChow.com is a PR 4, down from a PR 5 when I wrote this post: PAULA NEAL MOONEY: PageRank Dropped from 5 to 4 … Thank God it didn’t drop to zero! PaulaNealMooney.com dropped from 5 to 4 to now a 3 — but they also penalized me so I don’t rank for “Paula Mooney” nor “blogger salaries” nor other stuff anymore. Sucks, but I’m glad I’m focused on my other websites — which I hope get a PR soon… Great post again, Daniel.

thomas I went down one rank also. I first thought it had to do with dmoz not giving juice anymore, but it seems to be something else.

Jacob Share My HP went from 4 to 2 and I haven’t a clue why. I haven’t sold any links on it for over a month, I’ve never done a link exchange and have always been careful to follow the Webmaster Guidelines. That said, since I don’t actively run after PR, I’ll still sleep tonight but I would still like to know what happened. As if.

Andrew Flusche Google slammed me from 5 down to 3. But now that I’m seeing all these other changes, I don’t feel so bad. Fortunately, my search traffic has stayed steady. I’m still going to clean out some paid links and try to be more “valuable” in Google’s eyes.

Deep

Dave Networking could be the issue – maybe Google have decided that because many networks interlink their sites when they are not related, they are going to penalise them (as if they were a paid-for directory). I’d love to hear Google actually comment on what they are doing, rather than leaving everyone to guess.

Baris Unver My blog’s PR stayed as 0, hooray.

Darren Deep – I thought it could be them just lowering the overall value of PR – but how come some blogs are down and some are not? The text link selling theory doesn’t add up for me – as quite a few blogs that have been hit in the last 24 hours don’t sell them. The blog network theory could have something to it – although some of the blogs that I’ve seen hit are not in blog networks – or at least are not fully participating in link exchanges – and other blog networks seem untouched despite interlinking (like TechCrunch’s network). Maris – you’re experience is the same as mine PR is down but traffic is stable from Google. So ultimately for me it doesn’t matter – but it is odd and something I hope Google gives some insight on.

TipsoSaurus oh! my god! this is soooo bad. Problogger deserves 10 page rank! I really think that google should stop acting evil and must concentrate on making the things better or rather improving the Pagerank in a way that it doesn’t give too much weight to the paid links…but penalizing like this is not really good. Although, one thing is sure that these sites now really don’t depend on the traffic from google. Hey guys..continue selling the links 😀

Daniel http://livepr.raketforskning.com/ Some datacenters will still show a 6, but there are many 4’s there, so its changing over time towards the 4.

Patrick Burt The PR resources I checked mentioned problogger is still at 6. What resources are you guys using?

Maris My blog also dropped from 5 to 3 but I’m pretty happy that traffic remains the same. I removed all my sold links and link exchange partners. Will see if this helps to receive back PR.

Daniel My assumption might not be correct though Deep, I am talking with some friends right now and will update the post soon. Dhar Agree Dictionary