Google’s new PageRank update - what now?
This week, several popular blogs reported a significant decrease in their PageRank after the recent Google PageRank update. At first, the entire blogosphere was confused about what caused this drop, until it became apparent that selling paid text links on your website can hurt your PR. It’s certainly no surprise, since Matt Cutts has been saying since June that Google thinks link buying is outside their guidelines and that “we might take strong actions on that in the future”.
Well now they have. It took a while, but the confirmation about this update was eventually released.
So what’s been the overall effect on the blogosphere? The ones directly affected are those who have been making a decent income off of paid text links. PageRank is one of the more important qualifiers listed by people selling these links. A link from a site with PR 9 will cost more than a link from a site of PR 7. If site owners will adjust their prices based on the PR update, well… it’s probably not something they look forward to.
Of course, there are many “innocent bystanders” affected by this as well. If most of the sites that link to you are penalized with a lower PR, odds are your PR will decrease too. Not to mention the sites that were wrongfully penalized such as Darren Rowse’s Problogger. Other bloggers cried foul, and Google responded by restoring their original PR.
There’s even some speculation that it’s a manual update, since PR changes are mostly going on for well-established blogs, websites, linkfarms, and blog networks - rather than a general update going on all over the net. Right now, most of the big bloggers out there are at the mercy of Google. Personally, I couldn’t care less.
That’s right. I don’t really care.
Barry Schwartz actually had an increase in site visitors despite the decreased PR. If you check out Ryan Caldwell’s post on acquiring longterm leverage for your websites rather than being obsessed with transitory trends and changes in search engine algorithms. This PR update (or any other update) doesn’t have to affect you if you don’t want it to.
If you’re a blogger selling paid text links, what are you going to do now? First, if Google PR is important to you, stop selling these links blatantly. Or at all. If you still want to sell links, instead of using PR as a qualifier for your price, use pageviews instead or case studies from previous links, etc. That’s what I look for when buying links, not PR per se. There are other ways to measure popularity out there, especially for social bookmarking sites that depend on readers rather than a big search engine bully.
Or try selling graphic/image links instead.
Being too dependent on Google will cripple you. Even if they may deliver a huge percentage of your search engine traffic, you need to have a backup plan in place. By all means, use Google PR to measure some level of success, if you want. However, don’t hyperventilate with each change they make. It’s their search engine. They’ll do whatever they want with it. John Chow has been Google-slapped several times and I don’t think it’s greatly affected his popularity or income. I know I’m not John Chow, but using him as an example drives a point
Google Drops PageRank For Many Sites : Paid Links or New Algorithm?
October 24th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor
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Dude, where’s my PageRank?
This morning, around 1 am, I was finishing up a document and clicked over to Search Engine Journal to see if any comments were made on some of my favorite posts. Looking at the Google Toolbar, I saw the PageRank bar read a PageRank 6. After refreshing a couple of times and rubbing the sand out of my eyes, low and behold, after 3 or 4 years at PageRank 7, we dropped.
I can’t say I was too surprised. Search Engine Journal was not the only site I noticed a drop in PageRank on last night, I noticed many other blogs and forums I read experiencing a drop. And recent Google activity has pointed to a new regrouping of PageRank, which may be addressing the size and growth of the Internet since Larry PageRank was first published, or may be addressing the growth of paid linking.
So, I made some changes to my template to eliminate the 3 links under Supporters, added a button from AdAge and thought about new changes I could make to the site, some which have nothing to do with links, Google or PageRank.
The drop in PageRank did not keep me up last night as I drifted off into dreamland with thoughts of the next few weeks in my mind.
This morning however, I noticed that search marketing blogs were not alone. Actually, we’re in rather good company. Here is a list of some of the major sites ‘hit’ by the PageRank update yesterday:
WashingtonPost.com
Forbes.com
Blog Herald
ProBlogger.net
CopyBlogger
Engadget
StatCounter
Like I said, rather good company. Newspaper and blog networks which use a lot of intralinking, seem to have been hit hard; b5media, Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker.
One could say that paid linking led to the decrease in PageRank for these sites, but not all of these sites use paid linking as a source of revenue.
Furthermore, there are many sites which were not associated with this drop in PageRank which sell paid links, but I’m not going to out them.
So, why the decrease? As I wait to hear back from Google on the decrease, there are many reasons which Google may be changing PageRank.
Paid Linking : The easy excuse is that they’re targeting paid links, but not all sites which experienced the drop sell or buy links.
Mass Linking : Do we link out to too many sites via Blog Rolls? Does Linkbait just result in TOO MANY links, even if they are natural. Do blog networks use influential linking to their advantage? I think PageRank has been spread too thin and Google is changing its PageRank formula to address the mass publishing which has taken place over the past 2 years.
Devalue PageRank : PageRank is seen by many as the end all value of a web site. Our PageRank dropped but we are receiving more Google search traffic than ever. PageRank does not define site rankings in Google or traffic and it should not be mistaken as so.
Kill the Paid Link Market : If Paid Linking houses use PageRank as a pricing metric, then eliminating or devaluing PageRank will devalue paid linking
We’ll have some more news on the changes in PageRank, or the Great Google Halloween Update, but until Matt Cutts addresses this on his blog or Google… please sound off in the comments below:
Why do you think Google has changed the PageRank on so many sites?
Was your site hit? If so, why do you think so?
What sites have you noticed that experienced a drop in PageRank?
I’m seeing a number of new sites showing PageRank updates tonight, and assume that it has to be happening elsewhere as well. This of course comes on the heels of the PageRank massacre earlier this week.
There’s not too much to post right now on this as more information comes in — but I wanted to spread the word and see what others are seeing as well. Having expected a global update in July and never seeing it, this is certainly exciting news for those in the search marketing industry.
New PageRank Update
It's happening again: Google (re)calculates PageRank for the pages in the index. From what I've seen, only new pages get a PageRank, those that already have one don't get an update. At least for the moment. Google will definitely update PR for all the pages, but they've started with the new pages first as they have fewer backlinks.A great site where you can check the PageRank of a page is Live PR. The site shows you the rank from many Google data centers and it uses Ajax for that.Although the value of PageRank for webmasters has been decreasing, a PageRank update it's still an exciting event. The last major update was in February.
