If Google traffic went down along with PR, you would not be laughing
When Google reduced the PageRank of several blogs and sites which had participated in pay per review programs, bloggers whipped up a storm.
It was unfair, and a solid hit on the revenue opportunities for the upcoming blogger and all that.
All that is true. Some of us were bored, some were outraged, and many went campaigning against Google’s plan for world domination.

And some made fun of Google.
It is the era of Page Rank Demotion and like the seventies, the more outrageous you are, the more hip you will be looked upon. It is an era when the lower your Page Rank gets, the more popular you become, especially if your blog is a few years old and has a high PR before the trend started.
Well, always good to have a laugh, right?
The fact is, Google reduced toolbar PR for the sites which it thought violated its terms and conditions. Toolbar PR, as we know, is a ’snapshot’ of PR as it existed soemtimes a couple or more months before it is actually displayed in the toolbar. Along with Alexa ranking, this is the measure which services like PayPerPost and ReviewMe, or TLA, use to calculate the kind of money you are gonna make. So basically Google just took that measure away, and made it harder to estimate the value of a link from a blog or site.
What they did not do was to actually hit the sites with a penalty.
If they did that, that would have been something! A lot of sites get most of their traffic from search engines. A penalty would mean that traffic would dwindle to nothing.
And we would not be laughing, either.
This may not affect those blogs or sites which either command a very high reader loyalty, already have a high brand value, or depend on social sites such as Digg or StumbleUpon to get their daily traffic. But if you are not one of them, or if even a substantial percentage of your traffic came from organic Google search results, boy, wouldn’t you be weeping.
After talking to a lot of bloggers – most of them young – I realise that this is all a joke for many. Try to make some extra moolah, of course I have a right to do that, Google would not be hurting me, my site is too small… and all that. Wishful thinking.
Go through the Google News Archive in Webmasterworld. Search for the word penalty.
You will see a lot of sob stories. I got banned for this, I got a -30 penalty, a -950 penalty and whatnot.
There are rather large established sites which had to fire people when a Google penalty hit them. There were sites which had to close shop when a Google penalty that hit them for no reason they could understand or fix continued for six months.
Make no mistake.
The toolbar PR reduction is a joke. But it is also a warning shot across the bow.
Mess with the Google Gods are your own peril.









