PageRank Penalties: One Year After

There was already a year or more, sites among the most popular saw their PageRank displayed dropped from 7 to 4 and we thought a provisional sanction from Google.

But we must note that 16 months later it is not the case, these penalties are still in place.

They have no real impact on traffic, but are intended to discourage webmasters to use their PR as a bargaining chip for the provision of paid backlinks, or as a base to exchange links.
This was well-known names:

One would have thought that SEO professional were protected from such a misadventure. Quite the opposite in fact, this is where the largest proportion of sites were affected:

A website (kinderstart.com) has sued Google, and was dismissed.

However, we can verify that some of the sites affected have recovered their PR:

One must conclude that some sites have managed to return to a policy of natural links and others not, but since this does not affect traffic and the green bar PR display (and logically transmitted) is totally ignored by the general public, this has no importance in their mind.