An interesting note about the patented Google PageRank formula is how much the toolbar seems to favor blogs. I suppose it makes sense, because blogs are social networking-style sites which have natural linking patterns, but blogs seem to be at odds with several popular SEO theories, namely:

• Don’t crosslink websites or do sitewide links
• Links need to be related to a theme in order to be important
• .Edu or other mysterious extension links have a magical power which will rocket the linkee to the top

Any of these theories may be true, I have no particular proof of any of them, but I from looking at the Google Toolbar, you can clearly see that weblogs violate these rules and do very well in the green pixel sweepstakes. Although Google does a great job of evaluating backlinks, they probably do not evaluate backlinks in the way that many people think they do these days.