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They turn me off,

I see quite a bit of flux in the Google.com SERPs that I watch closely.  In retail areas I attribute some of it to the expiration of paid links for the Christmas buying season.  But, overall there is a lot of flux. Keep in mind that Google is always running test algos and we could be seeing a lot of them. Everyone knows that google is experimenting with their Panda updates.  Just recently they preached at free hosting to dump spammy sites.  I speculate that they are struggling with their arrows coming down on scrapers and quality which are difficult for their algo to separate.

I dont think the like has its value dissolved. it is a follow link, google concern is not passing link juice, they dont want you to be able to link to someone without costing link juice,. If it is follow and it can be folowed, meaning it does not have a redirecet page blocked by robots, then it will pass link juice. see what Matt Cutts says http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmoHmfy5AcQ