This is Syntagma’s 500th post since this site was established in October 2006.

It’s hard to believe but we’ve been going for almost 15 months. The posting rate works out at 1.11 recurring posts per day — not that I ever wrote 1.11 recurring posts in a day.

Followers of English cricket and Naval battles will recognize 111 as “Nelson’s number”, which is an excellent omen here in the West Country. It means our constant quest for pieces of eight and Spanish doubloons should bear ample fruit.

I also want to remember Syntagma’s first incarnation as synastry.blogspot.com. It ran for a year on Google bandwidth, for which I thank them, and made a little bit of a stir in the blogosphere, which emboldened me to get our own domain, followed by a 50-strong network.

So here’s to another 500 posts and an even bigger splash when we reach 1000.

We are about to unveil our long-awaited new design for the Syntagma network, following on from the launch of our three network magazine portals late last year.

Thord Hedengren, who designed the portals, is also producing our new network look. The idea is to carry a similarity of design features from portal to site, creating a distinctive Syntagma style. As a network that started out on the Wal-Mart principle of “pile ‘em in ‘n’ stack ‘em high”, this will be a major departure for us.

But then, Petticoat Lane to Bond Street was always our secret trajectory.

We’re getting a draft of the designwork this week, so it shouldn’t be too long before Syntagma joins the fashionistas at the top of the style league.

Watch this spice [sic].

I’ve sometimes thought that Google’s great project of delineating and mapping the entire internet was time-limited and would some day explode in its face.

The fact is, no matter how much they expand their datacenter infrastructure with cheap Dell computers, the number of pages on the net will grow faster — probably exponentially faster. The question now exercising us is : has the process of melt-down begun?

A few days back I wrote about the current PR regrade and described it as “weird”. Many of our Wordpress sites have remained untouched at PR0 despite clocking around 500 backlinks on Google’s own link: operator. Other, very successful sites have lost PR for no apparent reason.

At first I thought we were being penalized for some factor hidden away below the radar. But others are complaining too, including The Blog Herald and some SEO experts.

I won’t repeat the two examples I gave before, but take our three magazine portals. The first launched, Allusionz, has many more backlinks than the second, Phi. Both sites have been ignored. However, the last site launched, LifeTimes, with fewer backlinks, has been given a 4.

I could go on. Frankly a system with this number of anomalies is worse than useless, it’s positively harmful. Content businesses need to plan ahead. If a crucial metric goes haywire it makes it much more difficult. Better that Google admits it’s overwhelmed and either sorts the system out or withdraws the PageRank measure altogether.

So I ask again, has Google botched this regrade, or has the famed algorithm become so overworked it no longer functions logically?

Has Google suffered melt-down at last?

I know a lot of people who pay scant attention to Google PageRank (Page as in Larry Page, not as in “a page”). Until now I’ve been broadly satisfied with the system despite the occasional anomaly. Considering the billions of “pages” out there (not you Larry), it’s only natural they foul up a few.

The system began around a decade ago when the aforementioned Larry applied the academic citation system to the Web (see my short piece on the process here). He revolutionized internet metrics and established eventual Google control over it. He must have been as happy as Larry.

So, although we don’t know all the parameters used in their Algorithm, we do know that backlinks (sources not total links) are the main measure of a site’s importance.

Currently, a PR regrade is going on, and it’s amazingly weird. At the last one in September, nearly all our sites more than three months old were set at 5, a respectable score to attract advertising. This time, quite a few are being downgraded to 4 for no apparent reason.

Take our most popular site, Royal Anecdotes, which attracts between 12,000 and 19,000 unique visitors a day. It has a healthy comments section, which has become more like a forum. The site is linked to by lots of other high-volume websites, yet remains at average levels for the network according to Google’s link: operator. It’s currently showing a PR of 4, down from 5, despite fresh daily postings of original material. Inexplicable.

This site, Syntagma, is showing over 1000 backlinks on the dodgy link: operator, but was pinned back to PR4 on six of Google’s datacenters and the toolbar two days ago, off from its previous 5. It’s now recovered to 5, but it should be much more, possibly a 7, certainly a 6.

The same is happening all over the network. Clearly we’re being penalized for something. Could it be the Text Link Ads at the top of the site, in index.php? Could it be something else?

Google’s top man in charge of the index would surely know. So Matt (Matt Cutts), why are you doing this to poor old Syntagma? What have we done to spook you? I know you’re not the “fat lady”, but we’d be grateful for a song.