Looks like this update is causing a lot of webmasters a certain amount of grief. From my brief check of many websites, a lot of these sites got a big knockdown in their PageRank. And it looks like directories are the worst to be hit. Big famous directories like Aviva Directory and Alive Directory had their PR slashed from PR7 to PR4! Even Yahoo Directory dropped from PR9 to PR7. But I really feel it for a lot of directory owners, especially those commerical directories. After spending so much time, effort and money trying to get their PR up, Google comes along and start killing them with one brief stroke. I wonder what kind of loses are these big names directories facing as I am pretty sure the cost of administrating and running their commerical directories isn’t exactly cheap. And now with PR dropping like flies, the appeal of directories will not be that great anymore.

Anyway, I really don’t understand what is Google trying to do. And I think it is not fair to webmasters who had relied on Google and their PageRank idea to generate income. Yes, I know that “buying links” is not what Google had in mind when they started the PageRank thing, but it has on going so far already. Sure, it’s cheating and gaming the system. But it’s the system that is fawled in the first place. And ditching PageRank to another completely different “style” and not giving ANY information on what changes they have made is just not right. I think Google owes it to the millions of webmasters to explain what they have done and what criteria they use to calculate PageRank. I think it is not responsible for Google to do a slash like that without any explanation.

For me, I am not doing it commercially so it doesn’t affect me much. And I have faced only a 1 point drop in 2 of my 3 directories. Luckily, I did not spend thousands of dollars to set up my directory. If not, I would be nearly bleeding white just about right now.