Google Updates PageRank?

Google Appears To Be Cleaning Up PR’s

Seems too early isn’t it? I am not sure if an update is really happening but my guess is that something is going on. Why? Well, the one item that I have on my agenda is to visit some of my favorite blogs, everyday or as often as I can. This week, I have noticed many blogs that dropped their PageRanks drastically. It seems that Google is doing a clean-up following some recent events that took place from within their own structure. If you have missed this breaking news, you might want to read first an article about, Google Japan Drops PageRank, before going further.

When Matt Cutts said that “paid post is bad”, he was not kidding. This is something that we all have to seriously consider when monetizing our blogs. I am pretty much sure that one of the reasons that some blogs are dropping their PageRanks is because of this. As a matter of fact, Matt Cutts posted recently about this on his blog. Here is an excerpt of it:

My bottom-line recommendation is simple: paid posts should not pass PageRank. I’m not going to pay $750 to check whether the Forrester report mentions this important point. But I will mention something that the Forrester report probably missed, and I’ll do it for free:). The Forrester report discusses a recent “sponsored conversation” from Kmart, but I doubt whether mentions that even in that small test, Google found multiple bloggers that violated our quality guidelines and we took corresponding action. Those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more.
We do take the subject of paid posts seriously and take action on them. In fact, we recently finished going through hundreds of “empty review” reports — thank you for that feedback! That means that now is a great time to send us reports of link buyers or sellers that violate our guidelines. We use that information to improve our algorithms, but we also look through that feedback manually to find and follow leads.

Read the full post about Paid Post Should Not Affect Search Engines on Matt Cutts’s blog.

Another reason, perhaps, could be the fact that many blogs have been awarded with a PR at the last update (New Years Eve), regardless of certain metrics that we are familiar with (e.g., age of the blog, link popularity, number of posts, quality content, keyword density, conversions, etc).

Why do you think Google has changed the PageRank on so many sites?
Was your site hit? If so, why do you think so? What sites have you noticed that experienced a drop in PageRank? Do you think that this will kill “Paid Post”?