So what we’ve been experiencing for some months now has reached its apogee. Google PageRank values right across the blogosphere are tumbling like nine-pins in a storm. Some sites have fallen from highs of 6 or 7 to new lows of 2.

At first I thought this might be a general rebalancing of the system, getting everyone used to lower rankings and allowing more scope for megasites at the top end. But it seems it goes beyond that.

Darren Rowse at Problogger has seen a drop in his seminal site from 6 to 4. The belief of many commenters is that Google is attempting to crush the trade in text link ads.

However, since Google’s own Adsense is mostly a form of text links, albeit (presumably) with a no-follow hard-coded in, this does seem to be a restraint of trade for commercial websites competing with Google’s overarching system.

PageRank is awarded on the basis of backlinks, rather than raw traffic data. Nevertheless, traffic and backlinks often go hand in hand. A popular site will have both to some extent.

The Google Dance has changed in recent months. We now get a monthly update instead of the variable quarterly adjustment that reigned previously. What, though, persuaded Googleplex chiefs allegedly to attack a legitimate commercial operation that just happens to have an impact on the Adsense/Adwords system?

Text links usually have anchor text advertising a commercial service of some kind. Why should that be any different from Adsense text blocks? Except in obvious cases, how can the algorithm distinguish between links posted for PR enhancement and those genuinely seeking extra business by an online form of classified advertising?

It can’t.

Brock Boser, Chief Operating Officer of New York-based Text-Link-Ads.com — an agency selling ads across the internet — tells me they won’t be reducing their prices in response to the current PR meltdown.

Maybe this will do the trick. Or perhaps the current furore across the blogosphere will persuade Google they are not behaving well and should aim to be less imperialist in their business methods.

Has Google become the new Microsoft?

Update : Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch is comparing blog networks that interlink with link farms and seems to approve the “crackdown”. Come on, Duncan, you’ve owned a blog network and were a founder member of another. Pots and kettles, surely?

Update : Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has cleared up a lot of fog on this subect — “I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links. … In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well. … Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.”

The Americanization of Devon, England continues apace. Here in sleepy Exeter we’ve long had a MacDonald’s, more recently a Starbucks, and this month a sparky transatlantic style shopping mall. All we need to complete the process is an Apple store.

You’ll never guess what I disovered this morning while walking through the new shop zone? …

Well waddayaknow! I wonder if Steve Jobs will open it in person. Exeter’s geek community can hardly wait.

The upshot of all this is that we’re going to get iPhone availablility on our doorstep before Christmas. In my mind’s eye I can see the long line of people snaking down Princesshay and right out of town as we queue for a limited supply of these must-have gizmos.

Maybe there’ll be the iPod Touch too — great for web browsing, we’re told. And, of course, that other agonizing decision : to become a Macboy — or not.

I’ve used Windows PCs for years because life is too short for chopping and changing operating systems. Yet, almost my first serious computer was the earliest Apple, the Lisa. I already had the IBM PC in my office where I worked as a marketing manager for British Telecom. Those were the days when you had to input strings of code to do anything with it, and the WP was Wordstar, which operated solely from the keyboard.

Then the Apple Lisa arrived complete with built-in dot-matrix printer. I don’t think it was called a Macintosh in those days, but it had the very first use of “windows” as a feature, plus icons operated by a mouse.

Microsoft soon purloined these ideas, of course, launching its now dominant OS, Windows.

However, I got there first. I launched a series of publications for BT using a system of icons and a kind of window-like presentation. It was all in print, of course, but I did actually steal Apple’s clothes before Bill Gates did.

I think a statue should be erected somewhere, don’t you? Maybe outside the new Apple store.

England strikes back.

Returning to the subject covered in a recent post here on Google’s change of format for Adsense blocks which occur more than three times on a page, we have now reduced the default WordPress posts-per-page package from 10 to three.

So, if you want to read more than the top three posts — and why not? –just click on the link “Previous entries”. You will then be presented with nearly 700 posts dished up three at a time.

This gets round the awkward cut off after three posts, when Google puts up “This web page cannot be found”, or at least triggers it locally.

I hope this will gain more aesthetically than it loses in convenience. Please let me know if you have any problems.

Well, we never use cliches here at Syntagma. Nelson’s Trafalgar refrain is all over the papers today and on everyone’s lips — but not ours.

After musing briefly about whether to go to Paris to watch the Rugby World Cup Final between England and South Africa today, I decided against it. An autumn day in the French capital in the middle of a transport strike, cool temperatures, cool Parisians and hundreds of thousands of rugger fans is not as enticing as it might sound at last-orders in the local pub.

However, England’s greatest fan, Prince Harry, will probably be there, together with his South African girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, who will need all her diplomatic skills not to cheer every Springbok score. That match will be as interesting as the game itself.

Prince Harry at the semi-final when England beat France

Syntagma predicts an England win. The team will be two points adrift with seconds of the match to go. Jonny Wilkinson will receive a pass outside the Springboks’ ten-yard line, look up at the posts and kick a perfect drop goal to take the match by one point.

How do I know this? It happens every time : in the semi-final last week, and in the previous final in Australia four years ago. It’s now an established tradition. A British version of Groundhog day.

And Syntagma’s prediction for the Formula One World Championship in Brazil tomorrow? Lewis Hamilton, 22, will win in his rookie season, making sporting history in the process. He reminds me of that line in the film, Chariots of Fire : “God made me fast, and when I run, I can feel his pleasure.”

Who says the English are no good at sport? Actually, I think that may have been me.

I don’t normally get caught up in the spasms of patriotic fever that grip the nation whenever England or a GB team reach a major sporting final — which thankfully is quite rare.

However, Saturday’s Rugby World Cup final in Paris between what was recently a no-hopers’ England team, and the seemingly unbeatable South Africa, is catching everyone’s attention, not least in that sleepy hollow of scholarly values, the Syntagma office.

One of the reasons is that in the next few days the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is about to enact one of the great betrayals in history — signing the shamefully dishonest and authoritarian European Constitution while reneging on his promise of a referendum.

This act by Brown has been described by the all-party House of Commons Scrutiny Committee as “akin to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938″.

The rugby final provides a distraction for the dire political events happening not so many miles away in Lisbon. So, while Syntagma wishes “the lads” well in Paris, we simultaneously call down a multitude of plagues on the houses of all those involved in the Great Brussels Stitch-Up.

Oh, and I should mention that Englishman Lewis Hamilton could become Formula One World Champion in Brazil on Sunday.

We wish our great sportsmen the best of British over the weekend, while to our unsporting politicians, deep, unremitting gloom.