Where is Google’s famed PageRank system going after the recent shakeout that has seen many top-ranked blogs fall off the PR cliff?

Many starry personal vehicles and big blogs are now on a PR of 3, down from 6s and 7s, although the quirky BoingBoing retains its 7. Techmeme has a PR of 4; the front page of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, The Sun, is also on 4, as is The Blog Herald.

So why is this happening and, more to the point, what is it doing to Google’s business model?

John Evans has a go of making sense of this conundrum over on Syntagma.

Read it here.

We’ve known for a while the Google doesn’t like sites with paid links. Along with many other attempts to game the Google algorithm and obtain unfair advantage in search results, it’s thought that text links are a bad thing, period.

I’ve written a post on this subject over on Syntagma, which has been hit twice by the PR penalty.

Read the piece here.