The only important thing that matters is that Google’s search dominance is increasing which means webmasters are forced to deal with them whether they like it or not. At some point in time Google should be considered a monopoly and take a lot more responsibility over their actions. You can say that people should just “follow guidelines” but it’s never that straightforward or simple, and people’s livelihoods hang in the balance.

I don’t understand what you mean by “leave”. Where, exactly, would they go? I’m assuming you’re grouping SEO people with SEM people… SEM people will go where the traffic is, and where they can buy the most (and the best) traffic for their dollar. Google can do just about anything they want, but until someone builds a substantively better search engine (and all of the end users flock to it), SEM people are going to stay exactly where the users are… Google.

How may times does Google, and every sensible SEO, have to tell folks that toolbar PR is a poor measure before it sinks in?

If your rankings fall, then worry. Wasting time on a number long ago proven to be a joke is just, well, stupidity.

I’m not saying turn away free traffic, but you can only count on what you can control. So always work on getting traffic from multiple sources, making paid sources profitable, and finding new sources.

Anyway, these kind of things can be good, I predict Problogger and Copyblogger will be just fine. There are a million ways to get traffic, and if anything, they will just learn more and produce more valuable information after this. I wish them luck.

If your rankings fall, then worry. Wasting time on a number long ago proven to be a joke is just, well, stupidity.

may I enquire how you come to be so sure of this?

I could go along with “any SEO who uses ONLY pagerank…” but lets face it, PR is an integral part of the algo, and it does directly affect SERPs. see the HTML4SEO report below.

HTML4SEO Rankings & PR study

“How may times does Google, and every sensible SEO, have to tell folks that toolbar PR is a poor measure before it sinks in?”

…or, could it be perhaps: “how many times do they have to tell us that, before we believe it and stop selling it to each other?” I wonder, will that even work? ..or will they maybe have to take further steps to try to convince us? maybe even punish unrepentant offenders with PR (but not traffic) penalties or something? :)

Clearly some may have reservations about Google’s continual downplaying of the importance of TBPR, and that’ll probably be those of us working with client PR 2 sites, trying to outrank PR3 and 4 sites for our keywords & phrases. ..Yes, it can be done, but it would be so-ooo much easier with a level playing field PR-wise.

it may not be the whole story, but if you gave your PR 2 site to an SEO company, and they gave you back a PR6 site in 18 months are you telling me you think that’s not a sign of an SEO company who know their stuff, or that you dont think your PR6 site would perform better than when it was PR2?