Google PageRank Doomed?

The latest news to hit the SEO community was Google's latest update which resulted in hundreds of sites across the Internet losing coveted Google pagerank, as indicated in the pagerank toolbar, which is the little green strip in your Google browser (if you have it activated).

The big names in the search world, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz to name just one, are assuming that the most likely reason for this shakeup is the issue of paid links. Many have pointed out that it's extremely difficult to deal fairly with this issue: fingers are already being pointed at some sites that got penalized even where there was no paid linking going on, and others that are blatantly selling or buying links, yet emerged with their pagerank intact (up to this point that is).

Of course it's early days yet. We could see a drop in page rank for a subsequent wave of sites, or it could all end here. Who knows. We also haven't yet seen the full implications of what's happened to date: it's possible that other sites will lose pagerank because those sites linking to them have lost rank. We shall have to wait and see. It will probably be another couple of weeks until the dust settles. You can read more about it on my other SEO blog.