OakLeaf Blog Gains PageRank Parity with Bigtime Sites

The OakLeaf Blog's front page has held onto a 5.0 Google PR (PageRank) for the past year or so and its Atom 1.0 feed now ranks 4.0.

But I was surprised to learn today from DailyBlogTips' Google Changing the PageRank Algorithm? post that the following A-List sites had the same 5.0 PR:

• Engadget
• Forbes Magazine
• Washington Post
• San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com)
• Stanford Daily
• Chicago Sun-Times

and that notables like

• Washington Times
• Charlotte Observer
• Seattle Times
• Autoblog
• Blog Herald
• ProBlogger
• Copyblogger
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Engine Roundtable
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog
• Joystiq

had dropped to 4.0 PR in what TechCrunch calls a Jihad on blog link farms. According to Search Engine Land, Google is penalizing sites for paid links, a.k.a, accepting payment for outbound links to less popular sites, or large-scale internal links between members of blog networks. 

Search Engine Land's What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters is a good introductory guide to PageRank, a term that Google claims as its trademark. Robert Scoble thinks Google PageRank is dead and has been for quite some time.

Technorati Tags: OakLeaf Blog, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO