I thought John Evans explanation of Google's action, penalizing several blogs including my own Webmetricsguru.com (even though I did not do any of the things that are being punished) is more eloquent than any other I've seen, so far.

By the way, I write my www.ArtNewYorkCity.com blog for Syntagma, the collection of themed blogs that John Evans owns - and my blog there has not been affected.  Here's what John has to say about what Google has just done to many of us in Google attacks its competitors with PR meltdown

"…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 subject — “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.”

Ok, here's the thing - so someone at Google looks at my blog, at Google and decides, based on the blog template, they don't like it and lower my PageRank by 2 points - what does that tell you?

That Google's assigning of quality is entirely arbitrary now because they can't actually create an automated algorithm that will do a fair job; they've hired people who will arbitrarily decide some sites are to be devalued while others not … based on a guideline that rewards Google.  

Some sites are taking advantage - but many others aren't (I don't sell text links though KMM does do Sponsored Reviews). 

Were the sites that lost Pagerank ever warned beforehand?  No, of course not.

So you don't even know for sure what you did, what was done, or even the objectivity of the persons at Google who decided to degrade the PageRank.  That sounds a far way off from the system that Google started with 10 years ago.

Yes, I know situations evolve and change - but honestly, hasn't Google created all these problems they're complaining about in the first place?  Weren't they the one's that came up with valuation based on backlinks?  And now, when their Pagerank algorithm no longer works, they hire human beings to go in and manually rank sites.