Matt always gives great examples of how some webmasters try to game Google.

Bottom line: You’ll get caught sooner or later- and most likely sooner – so why take the low road.

Google’s stated time and agian that they value natural links to “remarkable” content, i.e. content that’s good enough for people – not websites – to link to it with no other purpose than pointing out good stuff to their site visitors.

Hence, the increased value of on-topic links from authority blogs, social bookmarking sites (when not abused), legitimate news services (not the Stanford Daily obviously), and real people doing real things.

The Google algorithm is only going to get better, so focus on improving the quality of your content and stop trying to buy your way to popularity….

I’m working on getting comment from Google, but so far no luck. I’ll update this post if I do get some comment.

Anyway, part of the buzz about this move is that some of the sites that are taking PageRank hits are the very sites (Search Engine Journal, Copyblogger, Search Engine Guide and the Blog Herald, among them) that cover search engine optimization issues, and some suspect that perhaps the search giant is punishing them for being critics.

Is that possible? Well, who knows?

But as Beard points out, not all the sites that saw PageRank losses engage in the practice of selling paid links. Instead, many of them are part of blog networks that have plenty of internal links between sites. For example, Engadget, which is part of the Weblogs Inc. network.

The guidelines that these sites may have abused? “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.”

The real question is, what has changed? It’s hard to imagine that all these sites suddenly changed their practices overnight. So for all these sites’ PageRank rankings to have changed at once does indicate somebody over at Google is playing with slide rules or something.