Did The Last Page Rank Update Show Such Signs?

What have people commented about the last Google Page Rank update? Basically, people say that directories and sites selling paid links have been hit, dropping a Page Rank value of 1 or more (1 in terms of tool bar, not actual value).

Given the amount of this that has happened, how? Webmasters are saying that Google has had people manually reporting sites and finding sites linked to from popular sources. But a manual process would imply processing of exceptions in the ranking algorithm – i.e. a list of sites that sell links and have to be dealt with differently.

But with my experience in the industry I know what a pain exceptions are in code. Just 1 exception makes the code harder to read, harder to maintain, far more difficult to test and every time you change the code every exception has to be retested. So surely they couldn't have done that?

So a better use of time would to have been examining the sites that are reported as selling links and seeing what they all have in common. Remember by list from a couple of days back? What do the paid for links, the link exchanges and the gateway pages all have in common? They use keywords a lot in the anchor text.

So it would be fair to say that it's more than possible. Let's find out next week.