So I woke up this morning, only to find that my two largest sites had dropped to a PageRank of 3 overnight! I quickly jumped on my favorite SEO forums, and saw hundreds of panicked posts about the same thing. Many claim that Google is on a witch hunt for people who are buying or selling paid links, and that they’ve even penalized big-named sites like Forbes, Engadget, ProBlogger.net, Washington Post, and countless other authority sites.

Many people who have been affected claim to have never bought or sold a link, yet they still suffered the consequences. There’s also the theory that Google was also singling out sites within a blog network that employed extensive cross-linking. I believe one of two things has happened:

1) Google has raised the bar on what it takes to achieve a high PR, and this is simply a readjustment across the board.
2) This is a bug in the PR algorithm, and it’ll be addressed now that Matt Cutts probably has 25K e-mails from upset and concerned webmasters.’

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe Google is just trying to strong arm webmasters into complying with the requests. If that’s the case, it’s really unfortunate – After all, who are they to dictate the business model that we base our websites off of? Many of us cover the costs of our servers, staff, designers, etc, by selling advertising space. If you take away the ability for us to generate income, ultimately many of these sites will dissappear.

I’m really hoping that this is just a bug, and things will be restored quickly..

Someone asked Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) about any pagerank news, and he got this reply:

Ezhil, I don’t expect a full PageRank update for at least a few more weeks, and possibly longer.

Quite frankly, this sucks! Many of us have been waiting for this update since late July, and here we are in October no closer to the goal. Sure, people tell you that PR doesn’t matter, that Google calculates pagerank internally daily, and the SERPs reflect the changes. That’s great, but if you’re trying to sell ads, you’ve probably already seen the problem this delay is causing – Advertisers are basing their decisions on your site’s pagerank, without taking into consideration that the last PR update happened way back in March!

I’ve got sites that are getting thousands of visitors daily, but because they were started back in May and June, they have no ranking as of yet. So these morons plug our URL into a tool such as SEO Tools’ Link Price Calculator, and the program tells them that your site is worth $0. Never mind the great Alexa ranking, the recognition from national publications, and the activity the site generates on it’s own. It’s PR or bust. Talk about a frustrating situation to be stuck in.

Hopefully, this situation gets resolved shortly, and the 350+ page thread on DigitalPoint can finally be put to rest.