There are rumors circulating around the blogosphere that the Google Pagerank penalties many sites saw over the last 6-12 months will be lifted with this latest update.  I think I may have one or two sites affected but not many.  Will be interesting to see what comes of this.  And if this is true, does this mean that Google has changed their stance on paid links?  Something to think about and again proves that you just can’t figure out Google.

While I’m not a firm believer that PR is the have all end all in this industry, having some PageRank certainly helps.  A lot of people still look to that as the guage to how good your site is.  Some of my highest traffic sites have low to no PageRank so consider that.

Check out the quote from Matt Cutts regarding the penalty situation.

“Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days.

I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.”