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.

one things for sure, google has certainly stirred up a lot of debate with this

Whatever, your explanation is, I don’t think you’ll be ever able to give us a fair answer. Because, what’s happening now isn’t transparent. You have still time to regret. So please restructure your algorithms for an unbiased grading system.(If you want people to take PR seriously that is.)

Do they want us to take PR seriously? Whenever I hear anyone from Google discussing PR it always seems like they downplay its importance. Especially the 3+ month old data from the toolbar.

I'm not too concerned about a PR decrease as long as they keep on sending the traffic.

I prefer to do what I want with my BLOGs rather then rely on trying to please the Google Monster.

Not that I agree with Google is doing, only that I choose to do something about it rather then complain.

Peace,

Michael