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The latest round of page rank scoring by Google has hit many good web sites very hard, in that the bigger list of A level blogs, and big blog companies like Weblogs.inc have seen a sharp decrease in their page ranks. This is leading to speculation that some of these sites will soon be joining the Web 2.0 dead pool, or have to reduce staff via layoffs.

For those who read this with an interest in SEO, I’ve noticed a few interesting changes on Google over the past week. Firstly, Google seems to have tweaked the algo so that keyword domains have lost a little of their dominance. So just because “blue-widgets.com” is an established, if poorly built and promoted site, it no longer seems to have automatic rights to rank No.1 on searches for “blue widgets”.

On Friday, I wondered what happened to a favorite LinkedIn feature for viewing recent users. I received two subsequent emails from customer service, only to find out I was wrong about the feature because of LinkedIn's questionable grammar. The semantic web's a long way off if we can't master our native languages' semantics first. Here's the first of the two responses:

Two critical security holes in the Firefox browser have been patched in this latest software release.

It even surprised me. Yes, even though I have been pointing out the possibility since July, and was forced by demand to release my study findings before my book was even half finished, I was shocked when I heard the news as well.

The launch of Gmail overshadowed many of the changes that Google announced recently. I spoke with several SEO experts recently about what they thought was significant about Google's changes.