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Google PageRank Gripes

October 24th, 2007

It seems that Google finally made good on the rumblings that they were lowering PageRank on many blogs that were selling links – including some that were affiliated with TextLinkAds – and others that may have been too aggressive with ads, contests, or whatever other conspiracy theory one can cook up.

Here’s a quick list of some larger sites that have lost some PageRank.

It may be worth checking out 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.

What is fuzzy is “link scheme” which could be anything from selling links to something as seemingly innocent as a meme train, or a contest where you ask everyone to link to you, while touting your PR. Who knows?

This blog is still stable at PR 5. I guess I can take a little bit of pride in that value is now equal to SFGate, Engadget, and the Washington Post. But in the larger scheme of things, it seems irrelevant. I have seen absolutely no effect on traffic.

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  • I noticed yesterday that apple.com/dotmac/ is PR10, while regular apple.com is PR9.

    Had to raise my eyebrow at that.
  • Yahoo which I swear used to be a 9 (raised some eyebrows there) is now a 10.

    Fanpop holds at 5 -- so you're in good company :-)
  • What I can't believe is that OneMansBlog just dropped to PR5 from PR8. Not only does John (the blog's author) know Matt Cutts personally but he even (at Matt's personal request) removed the paid links he used to have on the site. I could understand drops of one point as a warning, but so many sites seem to have lost two or (in John's case) even three. That seems extreme, especially in cases where people have fixed the linking problems. :(
  • Yeah - the more I read about exactly who was penalized it is looking kind of excessive...
  • Techipedia is down to 4 ... why? I don't think Tamar is selling links lol. And Neatorama? Are you kidding me? That site has tons of backlinks and a huge audience, a PR4 is just misleading, and all because they sold a few links. The punishment doesn't seem to fit the 'crime' in a lot of these cases ... a few small sold links and a site gets demoted to the level of a n00b blog. Bleh.
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