The mystery of the recent PageRank shake-up is beginning to settle down at last. Many sites, especially those running blog software, have taken a big hit.

For example, Techmeme has a PR of 4; the front page of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, The Sun, is also on 4, as is The Blog Herald — which is now more like Problogger.net than a news source for blogging.

However, many starry personal vehicles and big blogs are now on 3, down from 6s and 7s, although the quirky BoingBoing retains its 7. Syntagma is in good company then with its current 4.

What seems to be happening is that Google has caught up with the decline in blogs and blogging and is rebalancing its system to account for the over-ranking of many dull and uninteresting sites.

The perception has also been out there for some time that blogs in general have been using crafty methods of making money. Text links are seen by Google to be optimization aids for getting a false PR. In many cases, of course, they’re more like the classified ads in newspapers — just someone selling something.

After a lot of consideration, and a recent steady uptick in our network income, Syntagma has reached the conclusion that this may be a good thing — with some reservations, namely, the unpredictability of the process.

Separating out the pros from the dabblers is never a bad move, especially as the internet is becoming increasingly a major centre for commerce as its technology improves.

Google’s move has also forced a rethink on many online businesses about being dependent on the self-interest of another company as the source of its traffic. When a complex and essentially artificial algorithm begins to behave like an out-of-control robot, you want to find a more stable place of safety for your income stream.

Google has clearly calculated that it can dispense with most of the income from small blogs with little traffic, regarding it as the price of a cup of coffee from a long, long tail.

Syntagma Media would gladly take this nuisance off the bigco’s hands. A Starbucks cup of cents from each of 200 million blogs would certainly perk up our balance sheet.