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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  1. #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.

  2. #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.

  3. #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.

  4. #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’

  5. #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!)

  6. #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

  7. #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!

  8. #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

  9. #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.

  10. #11

    Comment by Richard on 24 October 2007:

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

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