PageRank Penalties Continue
In the past weeks many blogs saw their PageRank reduced. This was largely explainable by selling links using PageRank as one of the selling points. This also pulled in many participants in TextLinkAds, a popular blog advertising platform. That’s kind of weak, but somewhat justifiable.
But from my perspective, this next bunch of PageRank deductions that occurred over the weekend is a bit harsh and hitting close to home. Now it seems they’re going after the “mommy bloggers” who in the larger scheme of things, represent a particular demographic of self-employed do it yourselfers that… well, I kind of think there are bigger fish Google could fry, namely all the freaking splogs and spammers and black hat SEO folks out there. It’s starting to feel like bloggers are being punished for having entreprenurial spirit — even if they use TextLinkAds.
I’d appreciate if Google would just clear things up and say exactly what is causing the PageRank reductions (TextLink Ads? Too big blog rolls? Participating in memes and link trains? Speculating about all of the above?) This would help us all understand what practices to avoid in the future — or whether PageRank is even worth worrying about any more.
Yeah, I took a hit (down from 5 to 4) without any paid links or anything like that — I’m not too worried though cause it really hasn’t seemed to effect anything, I think PR is definitely mattering less and less.
I was lucky not to have problems with PR.
I stopped using TLA because of the low income. The space make more money with other advertising then TLA could provide. As for selling links I don’t think it is any of Google’s business how I make money.
Michael
Yep I have retained my PR of 5 through all of this. Although in my case it’s partly luck as I’ve been too lazy to monetize this blog further than AdSense and some Amazon affiliate ads.
I think this has been really interesting to see.
Google have been in effect penalising people for monetising their blog with anything but adsense, no one has complained of them doing that so far. I’m not saying it was an attack to stop people using competitors, but it seems odd to penalise for something like this.
I know adsense doesn’t create the same kind of link, but those pages where adwords advertisers have ads still come up on a google search for backlinks.
Google have always been tough on link exchanges and reciprocal links, but maybe they are considering this unfair SEO?