Well, I guess we know now why many blog networks are losing PageRank - fundamentally, anything with sponsored links - is probably going to get hit, if not sooner than later.

"…Now, the week following PayPerPost's first conference, PostieCon in Las Vegas, Google seems to have dropped the hammer on its latest move to stamp out the nuisance that is PayPerPost (that is my own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of all the bloggers here at ReveNews):

Ted Murphy wrote the following on PayPerPost's Izea's blog on Nov 15:

Last night Google decided to go after some of the bloggers in our network, reducing their PR from whatever they previously had to zero. Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.

It is no coincidence that Google has gone after some blogs that utilize PayPerPost and many of our competitors services. We offer a very attractive alternative to AdSense and are leading a charge to provide real monetization for everyday bloggers. Unlike the Google AdSense black box, we are palms up when it comes to revenue share and give bloggers the lions share of advertising dollars that they deserve.

According to Murphy, Google is slapping PayPerPost and its publishers because they are worried that PPP will break the AdSense hegemony."

It's hard to say if that's really true or not.  What I do think is that a "paid endorsements" that shows up as a lift for "organic results" in SERPS might be what Google is going after.

But if that's the case, why do they need to go after blog interlinking that doesn't actually fit with a paid endorsement?   I can see them going after blog networks doing PayPerPost and Sponsored Reviews - but some networks that got penalized last month didn't do sponsored reviews.

So here's what I think needs to happen - if Google wants to punish sites by devaluing PageRank - they should explain what the devaluation is based on for every loss of Pagerank.   If they say it's because PayPerPost is against Webmasterguidelines - let they say that publicly - as they are devaluing PayPerPost's PageRank to zero - so it's actually clear what is being punished and why.

In psychology class, back when I was in collage, long time ago, I remember behavioral psychology had the stimulus - response model - you put some meat in front of a dog, he salivates.  But a curious thing happened when you intermittently rewarded a stimulus (in this case, the loss of Pagerank) - people became nervous and anxious because they did not know what to expect - so they started living in a state of higher anxiety - because they never knew what to expect.

In this respect, by withholding direct explanations on why PageRank is being devalued (aside from the argument of "if it should be devalued or not") there's no real explaination of the reasoning behind those actions.

That leaves people wide open to make up their own reasons - which may or may not have any truth to them.  But it would be much better for everyone if Google just came out and said - PayPerPost.com - we're devaluing your PageRank because paid posts are against Google's Webmaster Guidelines - read paragraph xxx on page yyy and it clearly explains this".

OK, then PayPerPost reads it - disagrees - nothing happens, except maybe they get to change their behavior - and get their PageRank scores back - but that doesn't happen now because no one bothered to explain clearly the reasoning behind "why" it's being done at all - by Google (I don't care about what SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineLand says about anything - I care about what Google says they're doing - that's the explaination that's needed).