Google crashed on to the Blogging world with  a huge PR change. It’s the 2nd or third time pageranks are changing in this month, the first time in Google’s history. Many of the established blogs like Engadget and Problogger suffered the blow. Webmaster all over the word are sharing the experiences and most of them being a drop in PR.

Here is a small list of a few big fishes affected by this change:

* http://www.washingtonpost.com/ PR7 to PR5
* http://www.forbes.com/ PR7 to PR5
* http://www.suntimes.com/ PR7 to PR5
* http://www.sfgate.com/ PR7 to PR5
* http://www.statcounter.com/ PR10 to PR6
* http://www.masternewmedia.org/ PR7 to PR4
* http://www.autoblog.com/ PR6 to PR4
* http://www.engadget.com/ PR7 to PR5
* http://www.problogger.net/ PR6 to PR4
* http://www.copyblogger.com/ PR6 to PR4
* http://www.joystiq.com/ PR6 to PR4
* http://www.tuaw.com/ PR6 to PR4

Google is yet to disclose anything about this chang, but the most popular theory is regarding paid links. It’s a well known practice to get backlinks from high PR webpages to get the PR juice. Now it seems google is able to detect a link is sponsored or natural. If it is the case I think Google may starts ignoring the links which it thinks un-natural.  The huge PR drop of StatCounter.com ( from 10 -6) supports this theory as most of the link backs to statcounter is from the footer of websites using statcounters web-stat tool.

So is it the end of paid link sales and players like text link ads? Never!! Soon the google watchers will find out how to make their paid links looks natural! Let’s wait and see