A new Google PageRank update?

It seems today (April 6) that Google has done another PageRank update across the board. Naturally I went over to Matt Cutt's blog to see if there was a post about anything but left with an April Fools joke that he is moving to Yahoo. The next stop for me is naturally SitePoint and it seems it's true. Google has updated their pagerank.

The changes

This site has only been up a few months and I have gone from PR0 to a PR6, which is fantastic. This also seems to be the case with a few other SitePoint users. What seems strange though, is Google seems to be giving blogs and real content based and organically linked websites higher priority now more than ever. I mean a PR6 is quite a high PR especially for a new site so I don't see why it would be any other way. Previously, to get such a PageRank you would have to be linked by multiple PR7's (I think I have one PR6 link and a lot of lower ones).

What will the "Internet Marketing" industry do?

This really is going to be quite a shock for a lot of "internet marketers" who have built their websites up with link farms and link exchanges because it just goes to show these really aren't going to make a dent in the future for rankings. They've been saying this for a long time now but I think with this last Google update it's really proved itself.

On the other hand…

Some are saying it's either a hoax or pagerank is bouncing around. This blog doesn't have a load of traffic at all which leads me to consider these points.

Nonetheless, I am happy

UPDATE: A few others are actually posting their experiences on the latest post on Matt's blog. One even said his rank went from 0 to 8 unexpectedly with 6 backlinks. Strange.