I voted on the ploy to sell more AdWords.
I not really know how this story will finish, doupt that it would be already ended, but with some exceptation (highly promoted paid directories) i think only the toolbar PR was affected since doesn't caused ranking drop which means for me that the real PR is unhurt, not manipulated. I know that PR has only little effect on rankings, but for really competetive keyphrases like "webmaster forum" the rankings should have changed a lot if not only the toolbar value would have been changed in my opinion. IWT with the current Pr4 is the 6th as far as i know.

I don't even know what it is

If I want to buy links, I should have the rights too:


Regards

I voted - Its a ploy to sell more AdWords

I couldn't vote because I am not sure that Google has banned paid links.
My opinion is that google just blocked PR trasnfer for websites that used to sell links. And due to this many website lost some good PR links. Of course this is the case with the page rank only.When it comes about the penalties some websites received ..well this is different. Big websites like these ones that have been penalisez do not depend totally by the traffic received through google, so these websites will still produce $ . And I do not know how much it could improve the SERPs ( John Chow blog eg. ) ....

I support the AdWords conspiracy theory as well because website owners who's organic listing has been affected resort to AdWords.