There is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth going on around the web because of the number of prominent sites that Google is currently "re-ranking". The sites hit include The Washington Post, Forbes, Engadget, TUAW and Joystiq.
Google was originally based on the idea of PageRank, where the best sites have the best PR rating, and come highest in Google's search results. Google is down-ranking them, apparently manually, so the Washington Post and Engadget have been knocked down from PR 7 to 5, Joystiq has been knocked down fro PR 6 to 4, and so on.
So what have these sites done wrong? Well, Google is answerable to no one, but the almost universal guess is that the demotions are affecting sites that sell "paid links" and/or do cross-promotions, which blog networks do. Which means, in effect, that if you want to sell "paid links" you'd better use the "nofollow" tag or do it via Google AdSense.
Whether PageRank actually matters a damn is another issue, of course. Today it looks more like giving gold stars for good behaviour. And the search engine marketing people just think they've been bitch-slapped.
SearchEngineLand has a short piece, Google's PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links?, with a list of some of the sites hit so far, and links to 15 sites that have written about the issue.
Courtney Tuttle is one who points out the amusing hypocrisy of the don't-be-evil guys, saying:
Do they want people to stop using one site they own to advertise another? Apparently they do! What's wrong with that?
Does Google not use Google.com to advertise their ad programs? Do they not use Google.com to advertise Gmail? Do they not use it to advertise Google Video? Google Maps? Google News? So Darren can't use his site to advertise his other businesses but you can?
