Google Updates Pagerank, Shocks Many Leading Publishers
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Google is definitely upto something here. A Major Pagerank update has been dished out and a lot of popular blogs have been hit the hardest with the update losing quite a bit of Pagerank in the process.. General theory is that the drop in Pagerank is due to sale of Text Links on these sites, but I don’t think that is the reason for all this.
Take for example Problogger which was PR6 and now its PR4 or take Copyblogger which was also PR6 and now is PR4. Both of these sites do no indulge in Text Link Ads as far I know, so the exact reason for the drop is not known. Well I have built up my own logic for all this but before I tell you about that here are a few popular sites that have lost Pagerank.
- Engadget (from 7 to 5)
- AutoBlog (from 6 to 4)
- Problogger (from 6 to 4)
- Copyblogger (from 6 to 4)
- Search Engine Journal (from 7 to 4)
- Quick Online Tips (from 6 to 3)
- Search Engine Roundtable (from 7 to 4)
- Blog Herald (from 6 to 4)
- Weblog Tools Collection (from 6 to 4)
- JohnTP (from 6 to 4)
- Coolest Gadgets (from 5 to 3)
- CyberNet News (from 6 to 4)
Well quite a few of these sites do indulge in Text Link Ads so a drop in Pagerank is perfectly normal for them, but for the others its a different story. Well here is my theory,
By dashing out a major Pagerank update of this kind to popular blogs, a lot of people who read these are surely going to think if they buy/sell Text Links they are gonna get screwed and indirectly reduce the Text Link Ads market by a considerable extent. This means much less spam for Google to handle. I am quite sure that the drop in Pagerank shouldn’t be a problem, because I am pretty much sure that the Pagerank that you see is not an actual measure of how important your site is to Google. So if you loose some Pagerank on your blog, then you must be happy because Google noticed among those popular blogs crowd. Cheers!
On a related note the Pagerank of the homepage of dailyApps continues to remain 0, so no decrease for me so far. If you have noticed 4 seems to be the new Pagerank for a lot of blogs, so I wonder if the scale of Pagerank is now 0-5. Drop in your comments to let us know what you think about all this…
5 Comments, Comment or Ping
Innovations & interesting Ramblings
Why should they reduce the scale from 10 to 5…the wider it is the more better for google,isn’t it? otherwise pagerank distinctions between sites won’t be that great and google’s pagerank itself wouldn’t get so much of hype that we see today…google would better prefer the hype that PR is currently generating…
Oct 25th, 2007
Sumesh
Haha, same here - we just can’t lose PR from here. Hehe…
On a serious note, I do believe that more bloggers will come out openly against PR, much like J.Chow. After all, they won’t want Google to dictate terms of selling links. We may also see more nofollow links being included as sponsorship - ie, links for exposure rather than PR.
Oct 25th, 2007
Sumesh
One more thing here - its not just TLA, but generally dofollow links to unrelated sites/paid links to related sites that cause the trouble. That is probably the reason for loss of PR for engadget, SEJ etc…they link to network blogs.
Oct 25th, 2007
Karthik Kastury
@Sumesh, I have to agree with you on that one. Google is not going to dictate terms atleast here on dailyApps. I have my own plans on how I would like to go ahead. So my best wishes to Google..
Oct 25th, 2007
Janie
Just unistall the big G toolbar, maybe that will send a message, talk about text link adds, if you pay enough to the big G, they will reward you for buying those links, for certain.
Oct 27th, 2007
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