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.”

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.

I’m noticing that when Adsense users put more inserts than the allowed three on their web pages, the fourth now produces an ugly error message.

Previously, it would be cut off allowing you to post a small ad block at the bottom of each post, as we do. Anyone accessing an archived post as a single page would then see the ads as normal in every post on the site.

Now, it strikes me that the old arrangement would not be a problem for Google, especially since it obviously adds to their income from older posts. It helps the content provider too.

So Google have changed the way this works for a specific reason. It can’t be because there’s a drain on Google’s resources from the old system, a cut-off at three appearances is relatively easy to arrange.

And a high total number of ads may not come into it, either. Syntagma only uses two ads per block, making six in all in a package of ten posts on a page. If we used a sidebar frame with six ads in it, that would only count as one use.

So why this problem? Anyone know?