Have Google Lost The Plot?

[hazel]

We've all read it a dozen times - "my google ranking and PR have gone all weird". Yeh, well shit happens. But it seems to happen far too more often at google than anywhere else

I know that the Harem is still a new site. I know I shouldn't expect too much so early on in the proceedings. I know there will be downs as well as ups; But what happened this week has left me wondering just what's going on

The site had a PR4, for the front-door, and the link categories ranged from PR1 [only one cat] up to PR4 for three cats. Most where on PR3. You can imagine how pleased I was with that, as a newbie

Now the front page is PR3, and ALL cats are PR2!!! One of those has just six listings, and three are around the 100 listing mark. How can they all be PR2?

Anyway. Took a look at this interesting little resource - http://www.socengine.com/seo/tools.php - and found that a comparison with the likes of Inktome, MSN and Yahoo showed a disparity of 18% in average relevance across the site. With google downrating the site on almost every aspect

BTW: there's a neat little test for factoring the "sandboxing" effect here too. That might open a few eyes amongst some LL owners

Just what on earth are they up to?