Washington Post and Forbes plunge to PageRank 5 — Why?

If you sell links, Google is taking more aggressive steps to penalize your site by making it less important in its search engine results. It also drops the “PageRank” score it shows for your site. Danny Sullivan, of SearchEngineLand, has more background.
The latest news was widely reported yesterday. Notable, however, is the lack of real knowledge or analysis about the affect this is having. It could be huge. Many main-stream media sites are among those penalized, with some losing an entire two points from the ten-point scale. Washington Post and Forbes are among those that fall to a mere five points. That’s awful, because they should premier sites. It suggests they are among the worst offenders of paid or bad link policies, and they could lose massive amounts of traffic as a result. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of the real significance of this.

Here are a few sites affected, and the change PageRank they were given. See fuller list here.

• 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

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