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.