Real pagerank is an overall, popularity/attribution score with a ton of tweaks and corrections (even before penalties) just so it can generally converge depite the fact the problem grows (new pages) and shrinks (page not found/dropped pages) every second of every day. Not to mention, the distribution of main to supplemental index changes all of the time and that’s a pretty big factor as well that skews PageRank’s efficacy. In order to ensure that penalties appropriately affect all pages they point to, they have to be introduced during calculation which means that they offer skew to (but maybe not “correction” of) the algorithm.

Page-rank in it’s original form was certainly context indepenant. I think people need to get less hung up on a 3 or 4 use it more like a general gauge to say whether you’re doing better than the next guy in the SERP. If you are, than it’s likely you need other factors to bring you up. Anchor-text, title tags, etc… still matter.

As for people getting all flustered about going up or down or getting penalized, I’d make sure they understand it’s not a fixed score on a fixed scale. If you were at the bottom end of 4 and you got bumped to the top end of 3 simply because more pages are part of the equation or because where the 4 line has moved, that might not really be a big deal.

Finally, it doesn’t take a genious to realize they can spoof TBPR whenever and however they want for any targeted site if it meets their webmaster relations agenda. There is no garauntee that Google was “telling the truth” about where you stand or what you pass to others when the snapshot was taken.

Welcome to the show!

Like my Thai friend say, “Slow but sure!”

Interested point, though Google would only care about those it can hook into using AdWords. Webmasters interested in search marketing Google can live without. All it needs are 1) searchers 2) AdWords Advertisers.

Hmmm…a bit off topic but according to Ask they ignore NoFollow completely and anchor from comments seems to work well on MSN, hence my asking “Are you trying to rank high on Ask and MSN ?”

Ok, on with the On Topic comments! Thanks for the participation in conversation.

Rob is smart enough to notice that you are not dofollow anymore so it wouldn’t help him, but it might be a branding exercise, or an attempt to gain more clicks.

I agree with Rob, and made that specific point before. The possible slander and defamation is in how Google describe their toolbar pagerank to their users.

It’s a classical stroke of theirs mind – hit the most vocal and send out a message. Seems to have worked too, the message being Don’t do paid reviews, don’t link to paid review services (nofollowed or not) and don’t do paid links and perhaps most importantly don’t get caught doing so either.

Oh well, there’s always the confess your sins reinclusion route I guess