I’ve gone through many of the threads and tried to pull together an accounting of websites that have been “reportedly” affected by the update. Hopefully, by collecting this data, and combining it with reports in the comments, we can have a relatively comprehensive view of the landscape and make educated guesses and hypotheses as to the root causes:
- www.autoblog.com PR6 > PR4
- www.forbes.com PR7 > PR5
- www.engadget.com PR7 > PR5
- www.problogger.net PR6 > PR4
- www.copyblogger.com PR6 > PR4
- www.joystiq.com PR6 > PR4
- www.tuaw.com PR6 > PR4
- www.searchengineguide.com PR7 > PR4
- www.seroundtable.com PR7 > PR4
- www.searchenginejournal.com PR7 > PR4
- www.johnchow.com PR6 > PR4
- www.quickonlinetips.com/PR6 > PR3
- weblogtoolscollection.com PR6 > PR4
- andybeard.eu PR5 > PR3
- www.volodymyrzablotskyy.com PR4 > PR2
- daily.stanford.edu PR9 > PR5
- www.thecrimson.com PR8 > PR4
- www.statcounter.com PR9 > PR6
- www.washingtonpost.com PR8 > PR5
- www.blogherald.com PR7 > PR4
- www.seopedia.org PR6 > PR5
- weblogtoolscollection.com PR6 > PR4
- www.masternewmedia.org PR7 > PR4
- www.sfgate.com PR7 > PR5
- www.suntimes.com PR7 > PR5
- www.seo-scoop.com PR6 > PR3
- spap-oop.blogspot.com PR5 > PR4
- Onemansblog.com PR8 > PR5
My personal opinion is that these losses are primarily a result of Google’s continuing public relations campaign against paid linking. However, I’m certainly open to other interpretations.
Please do leave comments with any sites you know of that have been affected (or information about any of the sites I’ve listed above that may be inaccurate). Collective data is probably one of the best ways we can assess the situation.
Also – at SEOmoz, through our many tools, we have access to tens of thousands of toolbar PageRank scores for different domains. I’ve asked Jeff & Mel to run through those and request the new data as of today to attempt to identify the quantity of loss. We WILL NOT be exposing individual domains (unless they’ve already been outed elsewhere – as above), but we can provide an overall snapshot about raw percentages, etc. Jarrod Hunt noted in a comment here that he had seen a PageRank drop across the web, not just on sites selling links, and this should be a good way to verify whether our data matches his.
p.s. Please note that I’m not trying to “out” anyone for selling links. In fact, I believe there may be sites on that list that have never engaged in paid linking of any kind! I’m merely trying to document PageRank changes for collective study.
p.p.s. As Duncan Riley noted on Techcrunch, the AOL-owned Weblogs, Inc. blog network appears to have been affected, while Techcrunch’s blog network and rival Gawker media have not.
