Well, when we say "paid" it means unnatural links, this term include bought links, exchanged links (2-way, 3-way or 100-way, whatever), link given by a friend just because of he is your friend, interlinking of own websites etc etc. And 70-80% of these unnatural (paid, blah, blah) links have something in common .. which is pretty much described here in "General behavior of unnatural links" They are actually after unnatural links, not just ones you pay for. Does it make sense? It does for me Of course its not possible to determine if a link is paid or not, unless buyer or seller admits, but... I think whether a link is unnatural or not, it can be determined up to some decent accuracy and thats what Google has done this time. IMO. thats what I am trying to say..
Or, maybe due to the growth of the internet overall, they readjusted things so that sites are simply assigned a lower value. If a pr 4 site would have moved to five according to the previous update, now it just stays five. A five that would have been a five is now a four. I have (opps, had) a pr 5 site that has dropped to 4. No links sold on it, does use some no-follow links as google requests in it's guidelines, they are affiliate links, but there's not a ton of them and there is lots of original content. Serp has remained number one in a competitive field - so I don't really care about the pr. Obviously there were also other changes, as all sites were not affected equally. But I don't think my site has lost any pr juice compared to other sites. Just the visable indicator has been adjusted so that there's more room at the top. I don't think this is about buying/selling links.
Then why the drop in youtube.com i dont think they buy links or sell links.. My theroy is..... I think its due to relevent vs. irelevent content on the linked pags.. that or having to many 2 way recipical links..
I have to disagree with this. I have 6975 inbound links to http://www.after5webdesign.com/software.html according to Google's Sitemaps tool. 99% of them are from the Author's bio box portion of article submissions. All these links use the same link text: Submitted with Article Distributor. This page used to be PR 4, but it dropped to PR 3 last week. It may come back, but I personally doubt it. What this indicates to me is that Google is targeting links with the same or similar anchor text. This still fits with your footer theory because almost all of the links in a footer are the same throughout every page of the site (How many of us don't {include file="footer.txt"}?). We also know that Google has been experimenting with devaluing links with the same anchor text for a while. I'm betting they found that tightening the reigns cleaned things up a bit and decided to tighten it even more. This still fits the scenarios of footer links and clumps of links in side bars. One way to test this would be to use a tool to analyze all the backlinks for a page (I think iwebtool.com has one: the Neato Tool?). If a page lacks varied anchor text in its links, I hypothesize it will see a decrease in page rank. This does not in any way discount your theory Idiot Inside. Google may very well have decided to place very little weight on a link that is found at in the bottom 15% of the page. A test of this theory would be to create a template that had the footer links at the top of the code page but used absolute positioning to make them appear at the bottom of the browser's page. I do like your theory too. It's a fairly simple theory, and Occam's razor and all... Well, it fits the facts.
It seems as if those sites that are putting "unnatural" links are getting penalized. I kind of agree to what you have said.
Big G has penalised link sellers of all types (whether picked up through their crawlers or simply members of TLA and the like) ... simple as that!
I think it's a combination of 2 things. Google have tweaked their algorithm to reduce the effect of low quality links (those in footers.). phplinkdirectory.com, avivadirectory.com, bigweblinks.com etc all dropped from PR 7 to PR 6 a few weeks ago. Now they have hand edited sites that have bought links. So avivadirectory.com and bigweblinks.com have been further reduced to PR 4 and had internal pages de-indexed but phplinkdirectory.com is still PR 6. ...if they've finished tinkering of course!
Oh damn, I didn't say what I truly meant... What I meant was IN-CONTENT links, all with changing unique anchor texts. The theory here would say that 7000 links all from similar HTML blocks with the same anchor text would be penalized. Again, I originally meant articles with links embedded within the content, making them natural and suggested links by the article writer for sake of relevancy. I'm not saying to attempt to write articles to manipulate the ranks, but many people who choose to link to sites regarding the topic they are discussing. I totally agree that unnatural links should be discounted, and I somewhat agree that this is what happened. Look at phpbb.com for instance. It's a PR5 now. I would alter the link-back scheme software developers have gotten used to in order to make it more natural looking. This would be manipulating the rankings though! I think software developers (phpld, phpbb, etc.) should get credit for their work, but then if they go ahead and sell links on those high PR pages, they are doing something bad in Google's opinion. Frankly it shouldn't matter, until Google isn't the most used Search Engine in the world ( or whatever, based on who is counting).
Ah! Ok, this I agree with. I also agree that automatically generated links should not get the same weight as honest-to-god natural links. If I were to update Article Distributor, I would place a no follow tag in my auto-generated link, since what I really wanted was the traffic. Sure, PR is nice, but looking at it from a detached 3rd person standpoint, I would rather know a software appllication was popular because reviewers and users manually linked to it, and not because the application was able to automatically generate thousands of links and "scam" the system.