Well, looks like there’s another PageRank update underway, and it looks like this blog has been penalized / slapped down, for what I can only imagine is the fact that I have paid links on this site (or, used to be: read on). It used to have a PageRank of 6, and now its been kicked down to a humble 3, and yet others being zero.

Is it a surprise to me? Well, no. I mean, as you may have noticed (or not, if you only read this through your feed reader of choice), that Text Link Ads, the company which puts puts the Pay in Paid Links, has generously sponsored this site for many months (I used to have a giant banner on the top of this blog).

Now, at this point, many bloggers would beat their chest and throw up the proverbial finger to Google. Furthermore, they would include other culturally appropriate / rude gestures as well in the mix, ending with the “PageRank don’t mean squat to me, it shouldn’t mean squat to you, and I’m just going to carry on selling links”.

Well, here’s a sad, shallow, fact about me.

I *do* care about this site’s PageRank.

And it doesn’t have anything to do with this site’s perceived traffic, which is minimal to begin with, and which I don’t believe will materially change with the downgrading of my pagerank; nor does it have anything to do with PageRank as a metric that is used by other sites to rank DJI — for example, ironically, text link ads.

No, the reason why I do care is because, to *me*, its a yardstick of how well I’ve done with this blog over the past year (almost two) that I’ve been blogging for, independently of traffic, as its all about the quality of their inbound links.

And you know what?

I like that metric.

This blog has humble amounts of traffic and a humbler amount of people subscribing to my feed, but the quality of those in bound links don’t have anything to do with that. And for a guy who

• blogs part time,
• only writes opinion columns,
• is rarely in a position to break news,
• doesn’t write link-bait material

… I’m rather proud of how far this blog has come — and for those reasons, I don’t mind people checking out my PageRank, as it stacks up to other blogs which have a lot more traffic / much more popular than mine.

And in many respects, that public metric, to me, is a measure of the great links I’ve accumulated over the past year or so, such as TechCrunch, Mashable, Valleywag, ReadWriteWeb, 37Signals, CNet, Direct2Dell, and the UK’s Guardian Unlimited are included as well.

To me, those inbound links are a small recognition that someone somewhere (’professional’) thinks my writing is worth something. And if PageRank is one of the only well recognized, albeit troubled, public validation of that metric, then its one whose rules I will have to respect and abide by.

The bottom line is that I’ve realized what those links mean to me, and as a surrogate, what PageRank means to me, and they are worth much more than what any specific sponsorships or paid links bring in.

So, I would like to publicly thank Patrick Gavin who has been nothing but gracious and supportive of this blog, but as of today, I will no longer be accepting paid text links, nor allowing public sponsorship of this blog *by* Text-Link-Ads.com, in hopes that one day my PageRank might be restored.

(And yea, I do recognize that Google is a fickle creature, and lo, I may not have my PageRank restored even though I do banish these looked-down-upon practices … by Google).

Am I making a lot of sense?  Am I merely being weak and vain in the face of The All-Mighty (Google)? Shouldn’t I take a stand on all of this on principle?

I don’t know the answers to much yet, except that for the time being my answers are “maybe”, “yes”, and “not right now”.

You may have heard about the ongoing drama that is Google and how it has laid the smacketh down on paid links — and now, possibly paid postings.  Besides the fact that it may be hypocrisy writ large, as Google does a bit of “link trading” on its own with Google Mini (buy one and get a testimonial on Google, which includes a link back to your own page), I wrote yesterday about what its larger purpose was at the BlogHerald.

To summarize my rantings, I thought that perhaps Google was trying to make an example out of bloggers who use PayPerPost by penalizing them with a pagerank of zero; that by doing this, it would cast Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt into the hearts of all bloggers everywhere, thereby permanently (or, for quite a time) blemishing the thought of paid postings.

But I do wonder — was it really all that harsh?

Its been widely acknowedged now that the initial page rank drop that many blogs had suffered because of paid links hasn’t in fact changed their traffic or rankings.

So, what was really the point?  

Well, besides making an example out of PayPerPost Izea, I *also* wonder if all of these PageRank shennanigans are a way of Google telling us that — once and for all — PageRank isn’t important.

[caution: stream of consciousness rant coming forthwith]

Specifically, to use a published PageRank as a means of valuing your site, for the purposes of *selling* things like paid links, paid postings, and yes, perhaps even advertising?  Is this Google’s way of telling us to drop it?

Has Google recognized that there is an entire industry — worth in the millions of dollars, likely — which predicates itself on these highly malleable metrics, which, some might say is a twisted image of what PageRank as built for in the first place?

Well, one could argue that Google shouldn’t really care as long as it doesn’t change the purity of the organic results.  But perhaps that’s exactly the point.

PageRank has become a defining metric for all the wrong reasons, and although Google has some culpability by assigning value to in-bound links in the first place, perhaps Google does view the entire industry — in really broad strokes — as a spreading cancer that threatens its search results as a whole.

Anyway, total speculation on my behalf, but in thinking about this whole affair one is almost reminded of Google as the State clamping down on rebels who are trying to subvert the rule of law.  There are arguments on both sides of the coin, but with this recent development, one is tempted to think that these consequences for such subversion may be a little too harsh.