Unless you're under twelve, whose frontal lobe is under-developed, you will understand that recent worldwide drops in PageRank is just only a mind game toward link buyers and sellers. Most webmasters know that Google hate link buying/link selling/link exchange, since they believe it causes Google search engine to rank low-quality websites on the top; thus, Google do whatever they can to discourage people from buying links and selling links. They've written in their webmaster guidelines, blogs and groups that buying/selling links will severely harm their websites, etc. Many webmasters don't listen to that and go ahead selling links. Therefore, today Google has decided to play a more elaborated mind game to insert fears and panics among us. They lower your PageRank just for the sake of discouraging advertisers from buying links from your website. It's apparent to me and the others that the recently dropped PR has nothing to do with traffic and real search engine rankings. One website I manage had PR4, now PR2 and occasional toolbar reading shows it grey; that's not having PR at all. I look at the Analytics traffic stats, there is no difference before and after October 25. The traffic is just the SAME. More importantly the rankings at Google search is also the SAME. It is obvious that there is no correlation between the fake PR and actual rankings. Well the purpose of this writing is if you are a link buyer, don't get discouraged and cancel the links on websites whose PR have been lowered or grey-out, because the real PageRank is still as high as before. I propose that people ignore PageRank scores altogether from today. PageRank is a joke. Google has abandoned PageRank for ranking websites long time ago. Google engineers, if you happen to read this, answer this: "What are the differences between selling links and selling Adsense ads?" Of course Adsense is using Javascript to display links so that search engines won't follow. But what if some day, in this Web 2.0 Ajaxified World, search engines have to follow and give score to javascript links as well, will that make Adsense ads the same as the bought/sold links? Well, deep-down Adsense and buying/selling links is indeed the same and very healthy for everyone. They allow advertisers to advertise and publishers to get paid. What's evil about it?
Technology evolves over time, when HTML was first introduced there was no Javascript. The day when SE will index JS and ajax, there would be another language which would allow Ads hidden behind them which wont be followed. This doesnt sound like a big deal to me.
ok my frontal lobes dont seem to be evolved yet but, i got the picture anyway. Besides PR is just usefull for search results right?
I tend to agree that sites with lower PR are still passing good juice. I think this is only step 1 though and at some stage they will roll the penalty into the actual passing of PR and serps. Could be opening a can of worms for them in the way it will drastically affect SERPS.
As a webmaster for several years, I've never seen a correlation between PR and SERPS ranking. The website I manage had PR4 when Google sent it 200 visitors a day. It was still PR4 months later but Google sent 1000 visitors a day. Again it was PR4 when google sent 2000 visitors a day. Now PR2 and Google is sending 4000 visitors a day. Well, this is the beloved PR. It's useless. The website's ranking in Google is #1 for many best keywords. Lower PR doesn't seem to drag the traffic and real rankings down with it.
I would hope by now that everyone realizes that your sites PR will not effect your SERP's. They are not one in the same, they are two separate things in the Google world. Sites that lost there PR value did not see a decline in there SERP's or there daily traffic. Hell some of the sites saw an increase in traffic after they lost there PR.
Are you sure it's penalties and just not that they now have a more sophisticated algorithm that can better tell the difference between quality links and spam links? Also, the large-scale PR drop may reflect a change that Google made to reduce PR inflation. At the rate we were going before, it wouldn't be long before every site had a PR10.