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Well, it seems that the day we have all been waiting for has finally arrived. Yep, the thousands of bloggers and webmasters who have been anxiously waiting for Google’s latest PR update can now put their mind at ease. The wait is over and now a hell of a lot of them are shaking their heads in disbelief because all their hard work to strengthen their PR has gone up in smoke.

It seems in the latest shakeup Google has decided to kick a whole lot of us, yes me included, in the guts. This blog’s PR has gone form a PR3 to PR0. WellBlogME from a PR3 to PR2 and SBizzTech from a PR0 to PR1. Whoopee! Still I can’t complain because apparently some sites have gone from PR7 to PR4.

According to Andy Beard Google may have pissed off way too many people this time and may well suffer a backlash. Afterall if enough people get tired of Google’s treatment they may well go to other search engines especially if they feel that they have been treated unfairly.

Now we need to work out why Google has decided to treat us in such a fashion. What in hell did we do so wrong? It seems that many SEO tactics that we all so like to use may do more harm than good. So what are Google’s guidelines?

* Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
* Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
* Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Mmm, something to ponder wouldn’t you say?

Perhaps we should just disregard Page Rank, except for the fact that for Paid Bloggers it determines the amount of money we can earn. I was wondering if all my paid post is what has caused my loss in PR? If that is the case then I say Google’s PR can take a flying leap into the proverbial cesspool of diarrhea because I love blogging for money and no results taken from any web crawler is going to tell me any different.

So fellow bloggers what say you? Did Google knock you for a six and if so how do you feel about it?