For quite sometime now, Google pagerank or PR as its called for short has been one of the main ways to evaluate the quality of a website page. Thought there tons of other factors that can determine how valuable or otherwise a web page is but over time Google pagerank has become the main criteria used by some webmasters. This lead to the websites and web pages with high PR becoming hot commodity, links are bough and sold based on a site PR.
Google does discourage this trade in PR, arguing that artificial link that could directly or indirectly influence a site SERP should not be engaged in. This does not really deter link buyers and sells. Website and webpages with high PR keeps fetching premium price. Since the last few weeks, indeed few months, high profile website that sell links from their website seem to have been penalised for doing so by having their PR reduced by several points.
Some notable previously high PR and high profile sites that seem to have been penalised includes:
* Statcounter (from 10 to 6)
* Engadget (from 7 to 5)
* AutoBlog (from 6 to 4)
* Problogger (from 6 to 4)
* Search Engine Journal (from 7 to 4)
* Quick Online Tips (from 6 to 3)
* Search Engine Roundtable (from 7 to 4)
* Weblog Tools Collection (from 6 to 4)
iWT forums went from PR6 to PR4
Alive Directory went from PR7 to PR4
Haabaa Directory web directory went from PR6 to PR5
Search Engine Journal went from PR7 to PR4
Search Engine Roundtable went from PR7 to PR4