Google announced it's earnings exploded by ad income...
the profits sky high in the first quarter, as its earnings nearly doubled from the year-ago period to reach US$1.25 billion, far exceeding even the most optimistic projections.

Google-owned sites generated 52 percent of total revenues, while partner sites, through AdSense advertising programs, contributed 47 percent of the total... ok - so half of the cake are individual publishers.

more

Almost the same time Google started a public pagerank update that many folks
have been waiting now for 111 days since start of January.

This is combined with a backlink update as many sites reported changed backlink counts today.

It seems that generally many sites were downgraded - either on their index page or inside pages - and as it seems the general PR distribution made higher PR values even more scarce than with the last update.

This is the first full update after the NOFOLLOW link tag was introduced in January... the changes are pretty obvious drops.

Observations so far:

1. Overall downward PR scale correction.
2. Several big sites - directories and big newspapers are now a PR0. maybe this corrects within the next days of the "post-update"
3. Backlinks of age more than 3 months seem to be counted for PR transfer, while others are not
4. The update happened last weekend... one server was physically down and got a grey bar now.
5. the Time/Update-Factor: sites with regular update seem to get a higher PR

- Older established sites homepages - PR5 since last 3 years => now PR4
- New two months old site with PR0 - Now PR5
- Regularly updated PR4 site - NOW PR6
- Small site with fewer updates - PR4 to PR6

Some threads on this:

WMW
backlink update
Pagerank update

Update 4/25: for some hours and datacenters Google rolled back the data to the old values (version 1) or placed even new / re-calculated PR values (that have never been assigned to a page - version 2)

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