Google has updated pagerank on a lot of sites. For the most part it appears that networks of sites that interlink heavily have been penalized the most.

When I see this happening on smaller sites, I don’t see this is as being such a big deal. A site doesn’t deserve a good pagerank just because it’s in a network and you can provide it nice targeted links. This is pretty much the same thing as having paid links, they just aren’t paid for because you own the sites :) These are unnatural in Google’s eyes. The sites didn’t receive the links because of any merit of how good the content is, they received them because people like to interlink their related sites. No matter how much I’d like related links from my own sites to count, Google sure as heck has the right to not count them.

I think the more telling statement by Google is about the bigger sites, like ProBlogger(PR6 to PR4), and Engadget(PR7 to PR5). These sites obviously didn’t survive by the links of their respective networks alone. These have to be 2 of the most linked to blogs on the internet. They’ve created great content over the last several years, and they deserve to be ranked well for it. Expanding on that, ProBlogger, didn’t even sell links, which suggests that it was penalized for being part of a network.

All in all, I wouldn’t necessarily care if our sites lost some of their PageRank, I’ve never liked to heavily rely on link selling simply because of exactly something like this happening. Make money based on traffic and you won’t have this problem. For most of the bigger sites and networks, this should barely make a dent in earnings because they’ve been smarter than that. If the loss in pagerank directly resulted in a noticeable loss in traffic, that, is when I would worry