What On Earth Is Going On With The Latest Google PageRank Update?

October 24th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

It’s been a very long time since I’ve written a post while I’m at work, but Andy Beard just pinged me about a story he’d just posted, and I just had to write something I’m so stunned by the post.

Over the last couple of weeks, Google has apparently been penalising sites that have been selling text links by reducing their PageRank, although there’s been no official word from Google to confirm this. In the latest move, a number of sites including poor old Andy’s have been hit by another wave of Page Rank reductions.

I know you’ll be as stunned as me when you see how many A-list sites have had significant reductions in their Page Ranks:

A few search and money related sites as examples

There are some massive sites in this list. I’m convinced that it can’t be just because they are selling text links, as I’m sure that the number of text links that a site like autoblog might have sold, wouldn’t warrant a Page Rank reduction from 6 to 4.

Andy has hypothesised that the reductions might be because the reductions are because the sites are part of blog networks i.e. are interlinking and passing on Page Rank to non-related sites.

Here are the Google guidelines

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

If this is true, then does this mean bloggers now have to be careful about what sites they include in their blogrolls? I’m starting to think yes, as how can Google tell if a link has been paid for or not? I think the rule of thumb now should be, if the link is unrelated in any shape or form to your site’s core topic, then don’t link to it unless you use nofollow. Clearly other ‘blogs’ won’t be treated as being relevant any more.

I wonder what the policy will be about other sidebar content like BlogRush widgets, various other buttons & badges, site meters etc? Do bloggers now have to frantically spend this evening adding nofollow to everything?

It seems PageRank is no longer a measure of how relevant your site is (was it ever?), it’s now a measure of how well you abide by Google’s rules.

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About the Author

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Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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There Are 53 Responses So Far. »

  1. #1

    Comment by mlankton on 24 October 2007:

    I have to defend the opposing view. I have been commenting on blogs for the last month and a half saying this was coming. If you take TLA’s easy money or participate in links schemes, you do so at the expense of your site’s relationship with Google. Their business is making sure that pr and serps mean something, and paid links and link schemes undermine both. I for one am much more concerned about my relationship with Google than I am getting easy money publishing non-relevant text ads, because in the long run, Google is responsible for about 2/3 of my traffic and will make me far more money.
    I noticed Google removed about 2000+ links from my site last week in Google’s Webmasters Tools. I imagine either forum links, blog comment links, or both, are about to become worthless. I can’t blame them, why should I get authority from pasting my signature all over the web?
    I know people don’t like this, and are going to grumble about it for a while, but think about it. Google is building a better web. Which side of the fence do you want to be on?

  2. #2

    Comment by Everton on 24 October 2007:

    @michael

    I’m not too concerned about selling links, as that’s been debated to death now. But what about getting penalised for cross-linking? Do you think that penalising a site as big as Engadget so dramatically (even if it does include selling links) is justified?

  3. #3

    Comment by Everton on 24 October 2007:

    e.g. should I be worried about linking to so many non-related sites in my post ;-)

  4. #4

    Comment by mlankton on 24 October 2007:

    I understand how people are going to be up in arms over this, but is anyone surprised?

    We’ve all done things to manipulate our site’s authority, I’m certainly not innocent. I don’t sell text links or participate in link building schemes, but I have thousands of forum .sig links and blog comment links. I will continue to use both even if they’re worthless now, because forums create a lot of my traffic, and I have grown to like frequenting blogs and commenting.

    Is Google going too far? Probably. Yes. But they let us get away with murder up til now. It will balance out and they will relax their guidelines a bit, but some long-used seo techniques are probably done for.

  5. #5

    Comment by Everton on 24 October 2007:

    Is Google going too far? Probably. Yes. But they let us get away with murder up til now. It will balance out and they will relax their guidelines a bit

    Lets hope so. If they are going to start compiling all non-relevant links then the pain is going to continue for a long time, especially if you’ve been a ‘good’ blogger and leaving your sig all around the web…..

    One potential side benefit. I’m still a 6, so maybe I’ll start stealing some of engadget and friends’ traffic ;-)

    I for one am not going to change my behaviour. I never understood Google’s alogrithm before, so why should I suddenly act different???

  6. #6

    Comment by Kline on 24 October 2007:

    Well, these sites shouldnt be surprised by this drop..

    Just look at http://www.autoblog.com/

    The bottom like 20% of the long page is about *55* links out to other unrelated sites in their network. For all intents and purposes they are paid links.. to themself. True, a company can plug its own stuff all it wants, but this seems a bit extensive.

    Google cannot tell if a site is selling links. Impossible for them to tell. But it has always maintained that linking to bad sites hurts you. How can you be a ‘highly respected’ site on topic X when you link out to unrelated stuff 55 times on your main page alone. It makes sense in all honesty. I doubt it was ‘penalties’ per say, but likely a change in the algorithm…

    Kinda weird that the pagerank update still isnt a proper update….

  7. #7

    Comment by Richard on 24 October 2007:

    Thats to bad. What if you were to buy links, would you also be penalized.

  8. #8

    Comment by Kline on 24 October 2007:

    Richard -> Nope, but you probably wouldn’t get any benefit either.

    Google/Matt Cutts have stated time and time again that outside factors cannot *hurt* you, they can only fail to help you.

    If buying links could get you penalized, I could launch a smear campaign, buying only the worst links I could find, and link to my competitor. It would be like a reverse googlebomb.

    It makes me kind of want to rethink using tnx.net, since the site quality for those links you are placing on your site is absolute garbage. I’ll probbaly keep it up on one of my lesser built up sites.. just for giggles..

  9. #9

    Comment by Mike on 24 October 2007:

    Whatever their motivation behind doing it, they’re rattling a heck of a lot of cages at the moment and they’re not publicly explaining their reasons behind it. Another case of Google FUD.

    Let’s put paid links to one side, if, as has been suggested, that it’s down to an aggressive outbund linking policy, why not say so?

  10. #10

    Comment by Karthik on 24 October 2007:

    >>I wonder what the policy will be about other sidebar content like BlogRush widgets, various other buttons & badges, site meters etc?

    Blogrush is Javascript, so you won’t have to worry about it affecting SEO - probably the only thing John Reese did right about it - so far. I’m still hopeful about their v2 release.

    >>It seems PageRank is no longer a measure of how relevant your site is (was it ever?), it’s now a measure of how well you abide by Google’s rules.

    I believe you’ve nailed it there - bang on.

  11. #11

    Comment by Richard on 24 October 2007:

    kline, didn’t about that. I guess I could take down my competition.

  12. #12

    Comment by David Eaves on 24 October 2007:

    These sites have got off lightly compared to some, the loss of PageRank will not effect their rankings, other sites deemed less important like womenmumbles.com have been dropped over 40 places in the search results for their own names.

  13. #13

    Comment by Kline on 24 October 2007:

    “Blogrush is Javascript, so you won’t have to worry about it affecting SEO ”

    You know what’s amusing? Google has started hitting javascript recently. I shit you not. Nothing complex, it’s pretty bad in what it chooses, but I’ll be damned if google isnt hitting JS referenced AJAX calls for a ratings engine I wrote for one of my sites. I’ve seen it in other places, and verified that the URL it was hitting was only refereneced from within javascript. Still very rudimentary parsing of JS, but it is doing it all the same.

    Probably in the same way they look at flash files for obvious linking, but do it poorly.

    the drop does not actually seem to have had any effect on rankings imo…

    again ill say.. its weird that they’ve changed the rankings on existing pages, but it was not a full on pagerank update. I have about 20 domains with enough promotion behind them to kill a yak, and still not even showing a 0 PR. (all tests of various ranking schemes i’ve come up with to try out).

    also have legit domains that still arent showing any change, not that I really expect them.. takes some time to move up past 4-5

  14. #14

    Comment by Karthik on 24 October 2007:

    @Kline
    I’ve heard about Google being able to parse flash files to a certain extent - can they do it with JS too now? This would be big news!

  15. #15

    Comment by Mathew Browne on 24 October 2007:

    They may have just changed your visible (toolbar) PR as means to deter link selling. Your real PR might be different - Google Directory has different PR values to toolbar PR - see http://www.mathewbrowne.com/check-your-current-pagerank/ for further details

  16. #16

    Comment by Mathew Browne on 24 October 2007:

    Check that out actually - most of those blogs with entries in the Google Directory are mostly all still showing their old PRs there, with the exception of Autoblog (PR7) and ProBlogger (PR0!)

  17. #17

    Comment by Everton on 24 October 2007:

    @Mathew

    I think that just proves how random the whole system is, rather than the directory or toolbar being ‘accurate’

  18. #18

    Comment by Mathew Browne on 24 October 2007:

    Well, clearly there’s no consistency, and the obvious reason for Google downgrading the toolbar PR is that such sites are such attractive prospects to sell text links. Matt Cutts did warn that they’re cracking down on this, it seems in many cases however that this is a pre-emptive strike. Pagerank is almost certainly now meaningless - it was never a foolproof metric of any site’s authority, this just cements that.

  19. #19

    Comment by Sofna on 24 October 2007:

    I just read a post on this earlier as well. The blog author talked about how every site he had with TLA dropped in PR, but suprisingly has stayed the same in the SERPs.

  20. #20

    Comment by Richard on 24 October 2007:

    Who cares about PR, even though the long green button does do wonders for everyone’s ego. As long as your still in your keyword placement, I wouldn’t really care.

  21. #21

    Comment by Micah on 25 October 2007:

    So far, it doesn’t look like the PR drop has dropped traffic much, if at all. (for the blogs I can check their traffic anyway). Just don’t be linking to any shady sites or linkfarms…or be getting any links from them either. Other than that, just keep on pumping out good posts, and you should be fine.

  22. #22

    Comment by Dave Starr on 25 October 2007:

    This will be a rather interesting puzzle over the next few days. Of particular interest are Darren’s comments a few hours back. Problogger.net is arguably at the top of nearly every list … and they don’t sell links or use TLA, TNX, BlogRush or whatever the current “don’t do” of the day is. He drops to 4. John Chow, a very close second to ProBlogger by many measurements … and who, by his own self description is evil … he’ll sell anything that isn’t nailed down … also drops to a “4″. The logic, if there is any, escapes me.

    In reality, if you aren’t making a career out of TLA is, who cares. I have a PR 2 blog that I am reviving from the near dead. What difference does PR mean to me?

    The fact that I have one of my desired search terms on the front page of the SERPs definitely means something, though. SERPS results certainly aren’t driven by PR as some seem to think, I see plenty sites with higher PR who rank below me for my term.

  23. #23

    Comment by Marcus the Lover on 25 October 2007:

    I can confirm this. More than half in my blogging community dropped from PR 4 or 5 to PR 2 to 3. This is simply because we espouse text-link-ads and paid links.

    One of them even runs a paid subdirectory like iwebtool on his blog. His site lost PR for the same reason.

    I’m planning to stop advertisng TLA and paid advertising by next week.

  24. #24

    Comment by Joseph Plazo on 25 October 2007:

    Those blogs dropping to PR4’s not so bad. I fell to PR4 on the first quarter PR update this year, but my search engine ranking positions for the critical keywords I target increased!

    There seems to be little correlation between PR and SERPs these days.

    Maybe they should roll out trustrank in force and ditch PR?

  25. #25

    Comment by Harishankar on 25 October 2007:

    With a little research I did on few sites I usually read, I came to a conclusion like this: Sites that have wide spread content with no common point of target, and having bunch of irrelevant links on their pages, are moved down in PR. To make it simple blogs which are specific to a particular topic, say about mobile games or say its about mobile phones are not suffering but sites like this blog which have each page targeting different keywords suffer.

  26. #26

    Comment by Harishankar on 25 October 2007:

    But this time, even blogs that are particularly pointing on specific keyword are also hit… might be google is not happy with people who sell links to be simple…

  27. #27

    Comment by Harishankar on 25 October 2007:

    ok, now another prediction… Bunch of sites that interlink among themselves where everyone sell links, google has a new algo to find these sites and measure these 2 factors and penalize them or make their interlinking invalid….

  28. #28

    Pingback by Post-Buzz: Money Buzz Online. » Blog Archive » Hello, my name is Google. on 25 October 2007:

    [...] you blame me? Because of that pagerank? Oh please… I’m not take all of your pagerank. Just a “little bit” of [...]

  29. #29

    Comment by Everton on 25 October 2007:

    Google must love it that we spend all day talking about what we think they do, so they can do the exact opposite!

  30. #30

    Pingback by Google整顿网络 PR爆跌 | JooIT on 25 October 2007:

    [...] 前阶段炒得沸沸扬扬的Google Pagerank[注释1] 大调整一说法，目前 也逐渐清晰了。说法是这样的：有些知情者说Google发现PR作弊，付费链接的增多威胁到Google PR的权威性 (ps：PR是Google最早成名作品,目前为止，甚至还没有人能够完全搞清PR的完整算法) Google将对PR做一些调整。具体调整有些说，将PR取消 —我说 “不可能”！有些人说，惩罚付费链接，也有人说“不可能”，其原因就在于Google没有办法知道别人是否对你的链接付费。然而，这一天到来了：早上起床打开iGoogle就看到满天的喊冤和对Google PR的揣测…. 这里，这里，这里，这里，这里，这里，这里，这里，还有这里….. [...]

  31. #31

    Comment by Marcus The Lover on 25 October 2007:

    Interlinking won’t be detected if you host on different providers. Use varied services like rackspace, doteasy, godaddy, internic.

    And you fly under the radar

  32. #32

    Comment by Hair Loss Treatment on 25 October 2007:

    Richard I think that long green line makes a big difference to every site. Finally the whole game is all about BACKLINKS and PAGE RANK.

  33. #33

    Pingback by HoTTest News Today: Google Did It Again!!! | www.KPeBiz.com on 25 October 2007:

    [...] Here’s a summary of PR shakeup result extracted from Everton at Connected Internet. [...]

  34. #34

    Comment by Martin on 25 October 2007:

    What I really can’t understand is that Google is not releasing a statement about the current situation. There is no transparency whatsoever.

    It surely looks to be like random picks but I could be wrong. I think that someone probably reported lots of those sites in the Webmaster Tools area to hurt the competition.

  35. #35

    Comment by Kline on 26 October 2007:

    @karthik

    Yea, it certainly isn’t intelligent by any means… but I can guarentee the urls they are hitting are linked from nowhere on the site except for in the JS (the js is on page, not in a .js file). It is *quite* stupid in how it hits it..

    the code is like

    var url = ‘/ratings/rate.php?rating=’ + rating;
    … send AJAX request code…

    and its just hitting /ratings/rate.php with out any parameters… and i am sure it is google doing it.. dunno if they are just looking for anything looking like a url and just being silly, or its starting attempts at looking at JS parsing.

  36. #36

    Comment by Karthik on 26 October 2007:

    @Kline

    That’s still important news - there are a couple of webmasters putting links inside JS to avoid Google penalizing them, but yet being able to send traffic. But if that is the case, I guess I’m being paranoid here - what about the links on widgets like Adsense and Chitika and the like?

    Also, have you tried it to see if it works even if its on a separate file like you hint?

    They did start on a similar foot when they tried indexing URLs with parameters beyond the “?”. Now they can do it quite well - so I’m guessing if they’ve figured as much, its just a matter of time.

  37. #37

    Comment by Serg V on 26 October 2007:

    I think if sites stay in SERP is not penalize. PR is nothing, if site receive big traffic, and people like content of this site, page rank may be 0 but popularity and weight of this site will big.

  38. #38

    Comment by Micah on 26 October 2007:

    I’m not understanding what you mean Matthew…Problogger has a PR0? I checked earlier and it was 4. Besides that, you can check his stats right at the bottom of his webpage, and they are the same as before. So apprently it didn’t do anything to harm his serps.

  39. #39

    Comment by Sasha T. on 26 October 2007:

    I think it is stupid if they punish you for linking to some unrelated sites, I mean I want to link to everybody, why do I have to be punished?

    S.

    p.s. I’m not affected with this update yet :)

  40. #40

    Comment by Richard on 26 October 2007:

    @ Hair Loss

    Yes, its nice to be a PR 7-8, however if you are a PR2 and your #1 for your keywords who really cares.

  41. #41

    Comment by horisly on 26 October 2007:

    hoho, you site still pr6, that’s ok.

  42. #42

    Comment by Everton on 26 October 2007:

    hoho, you site still pr6, that’s ok.

    shush, big brother Google is watching

  43. #43

    Pingback by Connected Internet Drops 3 Belt Sizes to Page Rank 3 in 24 Hours | Connected Internet on 27 October 2007:

    [...] at least I’ll be drowning my ’sorrows’ this weekend in good company and toasting Google’s good health.  It took me 1 month to get a PR4,  a few more to get a [...]

  44. #44

    Comment by Hair Loss Treatment on 27 October 2007:

    I agree with you if you are ranking well for your keywords then it really does not matter.

  45. #45

    Pingback by Breaking Google’s Stranglehold On The Internet | Connected Internet on 28 October 2007:

    [...] backlash against Google’s recent moves was amazing to follow last week, and it’s been rare to see such little support for their [...]

  46. #46

    Pingback by Tevine » Post » Google PR updates for this quarter: top 20 sites on 28 October 2007:

    [...] pages get an increase in pagerank? *Values for some websites were found using DigPagerank.com. ConnectedInternet.co.uk helped supply some values for some web [...]

  47. #47

    Comment by La psicologia on 29 October 2007:

    I’m happy with this update since my site stepped from pagerank 3 to pagerank 4!

    A strange update anyway… we’ve waited for 6 months and now a lot of sites have lost 1-2 or eve 3 pr points!

  48. #48

    Comment by Richard on 29 October 2007:

    My main site has been a PR 3 for years now, I hoped Google would bumb me up at least to a 4

  49. #49

    Pingback by Google PR，到底如何是好 | 电子商务博客-关注电子商务、网络营销以及SEO on 30 October 2007:

    [...] 这么多知名网站的大型变动，看起来真是不可思议。这其中包括我经常去的problogger.net、copyblogger.com、johnchow.com等，一些英文Blogger针对此事都发表了看法，如Connected Internet，copyblogger，blogoscoped等都报道了此事。 [...]

  50. #50

    Pingback by From Nothing At All To PR4 In Two Months | Connected Internet on 15 December 2007:

    [...] November the much-maligned latest Google Pagerank was released, taken from an October snapshot. My site was granted a PR4, [...]

  51. #51

    Comment by D Web Design on 17 December 2007:

    Has Google tagged the text links advertising websites as bad neighbours?

  52. #52

    Pingback by Of Google PageRank fluctuant on 21 December 2007:

    [...] PageRank drops, Extra: Google PR sequentially shake, still have the Blogger of a few English, Connected Internet, Copyblogger, BlogoscopedWaited to report this matter. To the circumstance that this PageRank [...]

  53. #53

    Comment by neil strauss on 14 January 2008:

    Google done another PR toolbar update on 12th January 2008. I think the hype has died down on pr updates as less blogs are posting about it.
    PR as seen from the toolbar is outdated since PR is actually updated everyday. As webmasters we really should not bothered much about the toolbar PR as it does not determine traffic. What we want is keyword rankings, and an increasing PR is a result of a keyword ranking campaign.
    The only usage for toolbar PR is to sell text links, other advertisements, and gaining link partners. Though when caught selling links the PR would go down anyway!

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