This week, several popular blogs reported a significant decrease in their PageRank after the recent Google PageRank update. At first, the entire blogosphere was confused about what caused this drop, until it became apparent that selling paid text links on your website can hurt your PR. It’s certainly no surprise, since Matt Cutts has been saying since June that Google thinks link buying is outside their guidelines and that “we might take strong actions on that in the future”.
Well now they have. It took a while, but the confirmation about this update was eventually released.
So what’s been the overall effect on the blogosphere? The ones directly affected are those who have been making a decent income off of paid text links. PageRank is one of the more important qualifiers listed by people selling these links. A link from a site with PR 9 will cost more than a link from a site of PR 7. If site owners will adjust their prices based on the PR update, well… it’s probably not something they look forward to.
Of course, there are many “innocent bystanders” affected by this as well. If most of the sites that link to you are penalized with a lower PR, odds are your PR will decrease too. Not to mention the sites that were wrongfully penalized such as Darren Rowse’s Problogger. Other bloggers cried foul, and Google responded by restoring their original PR.
There’s even some speculation that it’s a manual update, since PR changes are mostly going on for well-established blogs, websites, linkfarms, and blog networks - rather than a general update going on all over the net. Right now, most of the big bloggers out there are at the mercy of Google. Personally, I couldn’t care less.
That’s right. I don’t really care.
Barry Schwartz actually had an increase in site visitors despite the decreased PR. If you check out Ryan Caldwell’s post on acquiring longterm leverage for your websites rather than being obsessed with transitory trends and changes in search engine algorithms. This PR update (or any other update) doesn’t have to affect you if you don’t want it to.
If you’re a blogger selling paid text links, what are you going to do now? First, if Google PR is important to you, stop selling these links blatantly. Or at all. If you still want to sell links, instead of using PR as a qualifier for your price, use pageviews instead or case studies from previous links, etc. That’s what I look for when buying links, not PR per se. There are other ways to measure popularity out there, especially for social bookmarking sites that depend on readers rather than a big search engine bully.
Or try selling graphic/image links instead.
Being too dependent on Google will cripple you. Even if they may deliver a huge percentage of your search engine traffic, you need to have a backup plan in place. By all means, use Google PR to measure some level of success, if you want. However, don’t hyperventilate with each change they make. It’s their search engine. They’ll do whatever they want with it. John Chow has been Google-slapped several times and I don’t think it’s greatly affected his popularity or income. I know I’m not John Chow, but using him as an example drives a point home:
Just make a good, regularly updated site that people will read, come back to, and tell their friends about.
What “good” means is up to you and your readers. Don’t let Google define it.
11 Comments to "Google’s new PageRank update - what now?"
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Increasing my PR didn’t get me more new visitors.
That’s because, like what I said in the article, other factors are at play when it comes to gaining new visitors. PR isn’t at all that relevant, except probably to measure in some vague way how many backlinks you have.
Google is painting herself into a corner.
SEO/SEM experts will know that PR does not matter as much - but are angered by Google’s duplicitous and double standard behavior.
Non-experts, and those who purchase services from SEO/SEM experts will look at the buzz created by the expertise, and conclude PR is of little benefit or value.
Thanks for clarifying some things. Do you know some of the other changes that took place? Is it still okay to buy links from relevant directories?
It depends on what overall effect you get from buying these links. If this is a method of online promotion you’ve done before, have you measured any success? Just like any aspect of marketing, if you do something and it works, keep doing it. If it doesn’t have an effect on what’s important to you (whether it’s sales or pageviews) then rethink your approach or stop doing it altogether.
I personally don’t buy links from directories (but that’s because I’m a cheapskate). I’m still looking into buying links from specific websites or blogs that have my target market as an audience, though. The three things I use to qualify ad purchases are:
1) pageviews
2) how much success others have gotten from those ads (if the people who buy it are bloggers, odds are they’ll talk about it)
3) how much I think I’ll make from those ads with minimum success vs. how much I’ll lose in advertising dollars if I don’t get anything at all
I don’t know if these are relevant to your industry, but these are points well worth looking at.
Many of the people (IMO) who were out there buying links were not getting a lot for the money in the first place. Since more often than not the co-citation from the link page is relatively poor because there are so many additional unrelated links on it.
Perhaps the biggest losers in this are the link sellers. People will always look for ways to manipulate their rankings at Google. Those whose SERPs were hurt by this PR update will just be looking for the next SEO fad bandwagon to jump on. Nothing beats good content and quality links over time.
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To the point .. My website had PgRank of 4 until about 10-12 days ago, I think Google had an update around that time. Next day page rank fell to 2on home page and two new pages went from unranked to a PgRank of 2, next day I lost all page rank through out entire domain. I believe I am being penalized, but I do not know how to determine the cause, Would you please direct me to a website or company that may able help 1) determine cause and 2) help me regain previous pageRank
I do not know if Google updates the pagerank, but I already has over 1 years with a PR4, every time Google does not put it more difficult to attract visitors to our site, Google wants all the web traffic for them, is not just be left to compete and I am trying to get by with Google Adsense.Pero really earn a pittance if you have it 5 to attract more visitors.
Greetings.
Seems like a VERY long time since a PR update. I have been hearing rumors that a LARGE (aka Florida) update is in the works. We shall see.