That’s all my Google Reader seems to be full of this week, those whinging about it, those whining about it and a few happy souls who are pleased to be getting some recognition! I’m honestly not sure how much value I place on Google’s PageRank these days – it’s a nice (or not so nice) little number, that I occasionally look at – but I’d be happier with a few more comments and a bit more interaction with my readers if truth be known. But I’ll comment anyway…

Joyce Babu has provided a wide selection of tools that you can use to check your current PR and possible future PR. I’ve had a quick play with the tools and it fluctuates massively between my various different sites, although one of the ones I make the most revenue from has a PR0 and is never likely to get any higher – which makes me care about PageRank maybe even less!

Rich @ Aiming for Independence provides some thoughts on what it might take to get a PR7 , which quite interested me – he makes a very valid point that the blogging community is probably shooting itself in the foot linking to other people’s individual articles and not their frontpages! Rich goes on to show what it took for one of his pages to get a PR7, and it’s only 200-odd links ranging from PR0 to PR6.

It appears the amateurs are doing very well out of this latest PageRank change, and the big established sites have done less well.

Duncan Riley tells us that Google has declared Jihad on Blog Link Farms, and the suggestion is that the changes maybe related to the sale of text link ads – but that is yet to be backed by any evidence.

Daniel at Daily Blog Tips speculated that it may be nothing to do with text links ads and simply a change in the PageRank Algorithm initially, with sites such as Problogger and Copyblogger (who Thanks Google personally!) sliding down the scale (neither of which offer paid links). A later updates appear to suggest that this change is a distribution of penalties for either selling links or heavy cross-linking.

So who has annoyed Google or is Internet Marketing banned from Google going forward, have you been affected and how?