In a recent post about paid links, Danny Sullivan wrote about how Google's army of engineers are going to start hand editing PageRank scores if they think you are selling links, which is a move that wreaks of desperation.

Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about. ...
Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.
In contrast, if you're a smaller site not deemed as important to relevancy, a harsher punishment of a ranking penalty may be dealt out.

Introducing the New, Corporate Web

If they actually follow through with any of this then Google, which touts the value of PageRank, clearly no longer believes in its value. They already show stale data in their toolbar, and might as well scrap the whole thing and start fresh. Their mind control exercise is getting a bit obnoxious.
Now they are editing PageRank and relevancy scores. They don't edit based on quality of information but based on method of promotion. And if it is a corporation breaking Google's arbitrary shifting ruleset then Google simply decides not to edit, or only fakes that they care.
Google is Wikipedia, but Worse

With this news of more hand editing, Google also shows that they are biased against small webmasters are and actively trying to screw over small webmasters to increase their corporate profits.
Google is becoming much like the Wikipedia, where generalists wrongly assume topical knowledge greater than that of the real topical experts. In some cases Wikipedia is saved by talk pages and community participation that allow the experts to be heard. Google has no talk page though, which means that Google search results will become a dried out and dumbed down version of the web.
The Real Problem With Half Truths & Hand Editing

The response to every move is a counter move. So if they actually try to squash link buying then webmasters will look for indirect ways to purchase links. Google also offers tips on how to sculpt PageRank, but sculpt to much and suddenly the intent is changed, and you are banned.
Why leave such a thing up to a single Google engineer making a judgement call? If they want to increase the quality of the web they need to be more innovative in encouraging the creation of good content, not make people afraid to invest into creating content only to watch a Google engineer kill it.
Link bait is good when you are a large corporation or are syndicating Google spin, but if you are too successful at link bait they will ban your site for it. They did it to one of my sites and they even banned one of their own site.
If you are a small webmaster and get judged by Google don't expect compassion. They have no talk page, and they already paid an AdSense publisher to steal all your content. They don't need you.
How to Do Well in Google

If you are a webmaster assume that Google is lying to you and ignore them. If their view of the web and webmaster advice are reduced to half truths and lies then we can only hope something a bit more honest will come out of their downfall.


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