The Internet is a buzz today with Google PageRank downgrades. speculation on the reasons for the downgrade range from an attack on blog link farms, the end of PageRank, removing AdSense ads, it’s all John Chow’s fault, etc. You can see a list of new PageRank for well known blogs at DailyBlogTips.
The most popular reason given for the first batch of PR downgrade (I went from 6 to 5) was that those sites that got hit were selling links. However, that reasoning doesn’t seem to hold anymore because Problogger.net (from 6 to 4) and bunch of other blogs doesn’t sell links.
I would say the most likely reason for this change is Google is messing around with link resellers like Text Link Ads. By downgrading a large chunk of the blogs on the Internet, Google has made it that much harder for the link resellers to sell links.
My feeling on this is to not even worry about it too much. Keep an eye on your search traffic for the next week or two. If it’s still the same then the drop in PageRank is just a number drop and nothing more. However, if that is the case, then PageRank just became irrelevant.
In other news, my PageRank is going to 4 and I’ve passed 13,000 RSS readers for the first time. Take that Google! 😈