SlyOldDog - 7:19 pm on Sep 28, 2002 (gmt 0)

PR counts for a lot less now, therefore so do the backward links. I agree with Everyman that Google has literally dropped a smart bomb that has caused "collateral damage" in the process.

Not exactly. The backward links seem to be more important than ever. But it's the anchor text that counts now - not the pagerank.

We are heading back now towards an increase in the value of link farms. Since a pagerank penalty is no longer such a serious problem, it will be easier to gain position by cross-linking domains with keywords in the anchor text. The only way for google to wipe these sites out will be an absolute ban instead of the usual "reduction" in pagerank.

This is almost definately a move against "pay for pagerank", but it also must compromise search quality because the importance of the anchor text is not weighted as much as before.

Google MUST have known about the search quality problems even before the update, so we can probably expect to move back towards emphasis on pagerank over time as google improves their algorithm to take account of paying for pagerank.

After all, PageRank is google's ace in the hole and the main differentiator from other search engines.