Google’s pagerank updates are always talking points. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, everyone focussed on PR as being the “end”, but over the last couple of years that focus has definitely shifted.
The latest update, which seems to have kicked in towards the end of last month, has left a lot of people very confused about things, though everyone seems to think that selling text links maybe the cause.
Tom analysed the shift on a number of high profile sites and noted that many of them dropped significantly.
Richard has zero confidence in the latest update, as it goes against all logic.
I’m not sure where the truth lies, but I’ve seen some really odd results.
This site has dropped from a PR of 5 to a PR of 3. Donncha seems to have been hit as well – I’m pretty sure he had a PR of at least 5 or 6 previously.
On the plus side some of my other sites have gained.
Films.ie – had a PR of 0, as it was a new site, but is now showing with a PR of 5
MovieForums.eu – as above. Now has a PR of 4
Others are still at zero, such as HostingDirectory.ie
A few others shouldn’t have ANY pagerank, but for some demented reason still do!
I guess that shows how little PR should count in the grand scheme of things!
It looks like the link weighting might have been changed Michele,
The most obvious way of dealing with blogspam and splogs is to reduce the impact of blog links. Thus a highly linked blog that relies mainly on links from other blogs will fare somewhat worse than a site that has a link structure based mainly on links from non-blog sites (or one that has a mix of blog/non-blog links). Of course this is just a one mug of coffee conspiracy theory guess. 🙂
My two main blogs had PRs of 7 and 6 respectively but both are 4 now. I haven’t seen any drop in traffic, and my recent super cache announcement has added a lot of backlinks and traffic to ocaoimh.ie at least! 🙂
My blog moved from 0 to 5. Granted, the old url, permanently redirected to the new one, had a pagerank of 4.
My (sadly basically unmaintained due to time constraints) twitterbuzz thing fell from 7 to 5; this probably isn’t surprising as the very high previous rank derived largely from a flurry of links to it when it came out.
It seems reasonable to assume that link sale was at least part of the cause; many of the heaviest-hit sites seem to have been big into selling links, using services like PayPerPost, or other dubious activities. Text Link Ads, the big link sale broker, seems to have vanished from Google entirely, though PayPerPost has survived for now.
Matt Cutts and others have frequently implied that Google will take a stance against link sale, and Cutts asked people to report link sale a while back.
Donncha’s blog is a special case because a lot of its incoming links are from WordPress installations; firstly, the links are no longer in the default installation, and secondly, it’s entirely likely that Google takes a dim view of such things.
On the whole, I think it’s a positive update; link sale was not a good trend, and I’d guess a lot of people are going to reconsider it now.
I don’t think Google penalized anyone for the default link in WordPress. photomatt.net is still PR 8 after all, and ocaoimh.ie was never a default link, only the previous url where it lived which redirects to the new site.
It was all about that link selling and possibly pay per post. Hey, what’s that at the bottom of your page Michele? 🙂
@Donncha – If they were logical about it they’d penalise anyone who was selling advertising 🙂
Paid links artificially distort search results, conventional advertising doesn’t…
Rob – only if the links carry weight. I don’t see the logic behind demoting thousands of sites simply because we’ve sold a few text links. If they want to demote the importance of the outbound links so be it, but the demotion of the sites themselves is more than a little drastic
I’d imagine that the demotion of sites selling links is largely to discourage the practice.
It seems that selling links is a direct hit on the heart of Google’s old page rank system. Google’s search algorithm is still heavily linked based and by taking paid links networks out of the equation, it should (theoretically) improve the search quality.
Surely this is old news though.
How many PRankapocalypses have we had now?
Google tinkers with their PR system,
some people gain crazy PR overnight,
others loose drastically and freak out over it
and so the whingers come out en-masse to protest,
and along come conspiracy theories and anti-Google blog posts
“Google have finally turned evil” and blah, blah, blah. (I’ve skimmed untold dozens of them in the past week alone)
I freely admit to suffering from Obsessive Page Rank Syndrome. Page Rank is the crack pipe at the end of the rainbow and we just keep chasing it and chasing it and chasing it. Of course Google know this too, and are more than happy to sit back and watch us jump through their hoops.
At the end of the day though, rich as they are, Google know they can’t afford to lose customers either and so they seem to know just how far to push us so as to make it seem difficult but not impossible. Page Rank has to have an element of Hocus Pocus to it anyway, that’s why everyone *claims* to understand how it works but yet can’t seem to make it work in their favour. And that’s precisely why Google pull these stunts every so often, to stay relevant and to stop us from being cocky and thinking we’ve got the system licked.
I mean if we all knew the secret what would we need Google for?
The other fact is that whilst the majority of people involved in seo and site promotion are quick to moan about these shakeups, they forget that without the shroud of mystery around page rank, they’d be out of the job too.
Yet every time something like this happens people seem to forget that it’s happened before (and is certain to happen again) and, as with any update, it can take a time for the dust to settle. Besides, even if one’s site permanently looses PR in a Google shuffle, it’s almost certain that one’s direct competitors are going to loose also thus levelling the playing field.
I left a couple blog posts a few days ago but they aren’t showing up. Did you receive them?
Cheers, Alan
@Alan – my comment filters have been known to be a bit too aggressive – sorry