Ted Murphy has been a lightning rod for criticism ever since the unveiling of PayPerPost, an ad system where bloggers are paid to write about an advertiser. Murphy's company, now called Izea, fought back against early complaints about non-disclosure by instituting a disclosure policy.

Compared to what happened recently, that brouhaha looks like a minnow compared to what the big fish in the search industry did to PPP bloggers. Murphy blogged that Google had tweaked the PageRank of a number of those bloggers, dropping them to PR 0.

When it comes to finding blogs on Google, PageRank is one of a number of factors used to qualify the authoritativeness, and therefore the placement, of a site or blog in Google's search results. Higher PR sites tend to rank well, which means people are more likely to find them and visit.

"Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising," Murphy said in his post.

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