October 24th, 2007 by James Omdahl
No Google isn’t sending out Googlers to go all America’s Funniest Home Videos on paid link sellers, but they are doing the next best thing - removing PageRank from sites who sell links. From what I’ve read Google started doing this over a week ago, but a new round of sites that are known for selling link (and some that aren’t) are getting a symbolic kick to the groin from the Google spam team.
Why is lowering PageRank an effective way to deter link sellers? Mainly because people who buy links pay more for links from sites with high PageRank…so when the PageRank drops, the value of the links on the site go down. Also, sites that are getting hit with PageRank decreases are likely to have already been tagged by Google to not pass any link juice…so in effect, Google is killing these sites’ ability to sell links meant to improve search rankings. (Of course, if you are buying links just to get traffic from a site, spend away.)
Of course, a move like this will only hasten the move of the linking market to the underground…where a lot of link buying activity has headed. (Or at least that’s what I’m hearing.)
The amazing Barry Schwartz provides us with a list of some of the larger penalized sites and also links to a plethora of reports from other bloggers on the switch. See Barry’s post here.
[Update: TechCrunch has another theory about the PageRank update...they think it has to do with interlinking between blogs such as AOLs Weblogs Inc. Read up here.]
October 24th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Hey James, it is really funny that people are acting hurt and upset. This has been coming for a while.
The secret to this (and any site) is very simple: Are you adding value to the internet with your site/content? If you arent adding value to the internet with your sites then you will not rank as well as someone who does. If you build something “friggen awesome” then people will gravitate to it.
Sure you can be successful with a spam filled poorly designed site. But just remember… Karma and what she is
October 25th, 2007 at 6:24 am
It is sort of ironic - While most of us are howling for a (toolbar) PR update because that has not been updated for 6 months (and is most certainly not correct), the sites that got one - wish they had not.
But also — Andy Beard says that networks of sites, all under the same “brand”, built to link to each other can also get penealized?
I never “paid” for links anyway, unless you could paying G, Y, and M for ads. ..or unless you could paying by spending my time to write articles that get picked up by other sites.
But I certainly did try to build a network of niche sites that would all link around to each other with carefully worded anchor text.
With PPC costs rising, and Google taking all the fun out of our linking strategies, what are we to do?
Well, for once, Im glad to be under the radar. Im slipping on my dark glasses now to look for ways to get linked. I think Im done worrying about the quality of the link (except for obvious bad neighborhoods), and just going for quantity.
A backlink is a backlink, and some are bound to stick.
October 28th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
YouTube is PR3, last time I checked, not sure if it is anymore
October 28th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Hey, I admit it, I have a blog - But are blogs really that useful? lol… I just dont know