Yesterday just about nobody got any work done because we were all furiously trying to make sense of Google’s latest crawl where hundreds of highly ranking websites (that is Google Toolbar pagerank) lost three or four points in rank–and in some cases more….Google Toolbar

By rank, we’re talking purely about the pagerank you find in the little green bar in your browser. This is not where you come in a search. That’s your search pagerank. Two different things. Those of us who hadn’t lost anything were commiserating, while at the same time trying to see if we might be next, or if we might actually gain from the situation. Many of the sites that had gone, say, from a PR 8 to a 3 were taking stock of the situation and contemplating what to do.

The most interesting discussions on the subject are going on over at Sphinn but we have some particularly relevant posts over at SEOmoz and Beanstalk.

The general consensus is that it’s a manual edit to sort out some sites that have been dealing in paid links one way or the other. But it could just be a new algorithm. Too early to tell yet, so stand by for an update.