This put Google into a state of disarray from which they really have not yet recovered (at least in my opinion).
You may have even noticed that Google is not indexing many of your pages and that the caching of your pages seems just a bit "off." This is the fallout from the server problem (and the attempted fixes) that I just spoke about.
Now, combine the state of disarray with what's coming down the pipe. (I call it "The New Rules"). Google is all set to completely alter the way it determines page relevance all the way down to how it determines "link strength."
You see, Google is still working under a method of determining link strength based on the linking page's PageRank. That is about to undergo a huge change. Google is now going to determine "link strength" by the unique number of clickthroughs of the link REGARDLESS of the PageRank of the site.
In other words, if you get a link from what is currently a PR 3 site that gets huge clickthroughs, that will be more valuable than a link from a current PR 7 site that nobody even looks at.
Essentially, Google is going to consider the strength of your site based not only on the link you get and its link text, but also by the "votes" that link gets based on usage from Internet surfers (and it'll be calculated uniquely to cut down on shenanigans).
Further, the "votes" will be regionally based. So if you get a lot of clickthroughs from surfers in India (but none from surfers here in the U.S.), then your site will appear near the top of searches performed in India, but will be non-existent for searches here in the United States. This move too will cut down on shenanigans (hiring folks to simply find your links and click through them).
What it means is that all those sites relying on rankings by using companies like TextLinkAds are about to get a POUNDING … unless they are using in context links (such as the way that SEO Chat does things), which are a bit more pricey.
In my opinion, this change in the way that Google calculates link strength is going to cause the biggest upheaval in Google's SERPs over any other update in Google's history … and that update is coming, in my opinion, early 2007 (certainly by March).
Search Engine News 
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