That is like a bank skimming a penny per transaction from your bank account for a year, and then when they finally reveal their theft – saying “well since you didn’t notice until now, I cant be that big of a deal.”

More shady behavior from a behemoth monopoly that controls a big slice of the online revenue pie – and shows no signs of doing so with any regard for anyone but themselves. Time for the FCC to have a look.

Q: If I run a blog and add the nofollow attribute to links left by my commenters, doesn’t that mean less PageRank flows within my site?
A: If you think about it, that’s the way that PageRank worked even before the nofollow attribute

(Which you can see here).

I don’t think it really works like that, but that’s what he’s said :/

@possible? – It is possible, but even with gradual changes you’d expect to see Wikipedia dropping gradually. Matt Cutts also mentioned that they didn’t tell anyone about the nofollow change originally because they thought people would notice, it wouldn’t really be that fair for him to say that if they’d introduced it slowly to disguise it. Although, guess you can’t rule anything out with Google

It’s also possible, but I’m not sure they could tweak other algorithm settings to get a very close match of what they had without this sculpting taking place.

That was one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind, how come no one reported Wikipedia getting hit, but Matt spoke only about the way PR cannot be sculpted anymore through nofollowing internal links, not external.

I guess that your notion of PR playing a small role also can be true, but with mammoth sites like Wikipedia or the ones you have mentioned, the cumulative effect would already be observable, even if the PR effect is minimal…