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Slapped or not slapped by Google

There is some talking in the blogosphere about the recent downgrade in Google PageRank of several successful blogs. I noticed few days ago the JohnChow blog going back to PR 5 from a previous PR 6. It was quiet a bit of a surprise as i expected a PR 7 for his blog as he is becoming more and more popular every day.
Google may have changed some PR Algorithm and blogs are now ranked in different ways. Time to reconsider how to maintain blogs, time to see what Google hates. The main suspect is towards paid links, blogs selling links… or blogs that resell links through services like “Text Link Ads”. Or maybe just a slap from Google to blogger that don’t follow Goggle’s Guidelines or are in conflict with them.
It may be difficult or much harder for Link Reseller to sell links. For downgraded blogs Blog future revenue may drop because “Paid affiliate programs” are often adjusted on PR and other similar criteria.
As some people observed, Google did a simple readjustment in the PageRank scale.
Problogger.net went down to 4 from a PR 6 and so several other blogs with plenty of good content. AndyBeard.eu is compiling a interesting list of sites slapped by Google.
I think buying or selling links is still one of the main reasons Google penalized many webmasters.
From the Google Webmaster Tools page you can read:

“We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRank™” in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.

Google uses a number of methods to detect paid links, including algorithmic techniques. We also welcome information from our users. If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We’ll investigate your submissions, and we’ll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.”

And from the quality guidelines of Google you can grab:

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. “

As for me, well Google PR didn’t slap me yet… i was PR 0 and i’m still PR 0. I should now go to Google Guidelines for webmasters.
As an important rule we should not forget:

“Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines.

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.”

This applies for anyone who cares about Google, of course! But as Google is still very important for quality traffic to your site it has to be taken seriously. Uhm, Google should add some ranking to me

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