… a peg that’s called PageRank.  Apparently I’m not the only one.  Darren over at ProBlogger has taken a big kick in the teeth taking his site from a PR 7 to a PR4.  I went down 1 to score in at a PR3.

(SWEARING, SWEARING, SWEARING)

I’m not entirely surprised.  When I’d read about the PR drop over at 45n5 and the reasons Mark gives for the possible reasons that ProBlogger got throttled over PR do make sense.  I mean Matt has written about reporting on those of us who use paid links on our site( http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/).

I haven’t hidden the fact that I do.  But now do we have to work a little more under the table to make a few dollars online?

I mean, I’m looking at trying to make a dollar or two here online.  I take reviews to make that money online, especially on this site which isn’t the easiest to monetize.  I also get paid to put links on my site.  I don’t hide that fact either.  Do I have to start hiding the fact?  Do it all under the table?

There are so many implications to seeing this happen across the Internet.  On one hand I see that they’re trying to clean up their search results… on the other hand I see a monopoly grabbing us by the short and curlies and making it harder to make a few dollars online by offering paid reviews or paid links.

What is this leading up to?

Is it Google’s way to squash the competition and we go back to using them all the time on all our sites being paid pennies a month instead of hundreds (well, for some - for others like yours truely - I make enough to cover my domains, hosting and a beer at the end of the month)…. but you know what I mean.

Seriously what’s going on?

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