Google confirms PageRank Changes
Matt Cutts from Google emailed Search Engine Journal and confirmed everyones suspicions that the Google PageRank Update last week was a result of Google’s campaign against paid linking and advertisement links which influence PageRank.
The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.
Interestingly none of my sites that have Paid Links on them decreased in PageRank and two of my sites (welovetxp.com & pepperminttea.co.uk) went from PR0 to PR5, perhaps this was just because of the changes made, not sure.