Google Pagerank Falls on Paid Links, Blogs
The blogosphere today is in collective shock after Google downgraded the pagerank of many leading blogs and news sources. The response tends to fall into several categories: we knew it was coming, pagerank doesn’t matter, and we deserved it. Techcrunch does a pretty good job of examining the evidence behind the update:
The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.
Here’s a table of pagerank changes organized by the percent difference:
| Pagerank -4 | Pagerank -3 | Pagerank -2 |
| Statcounter | SEO Rountable Search Engine Journal Quickonline Tips |
Forbes SF Gate The Washington Post Engadget The Blog Herald Autoblog Problogger Joystiq The Unofficial Apple Weblog |
An interesting tidbit comes from Syntagma who note that “the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.” So, it might not be easy for you to fix your linking strategy and regain Pagerank automatically.
Ironically, this coincides with GOOG hitting $666 today. And, Silicon Valley is calling us “Pagerankled.” For you people out there running blogs, an immediate solution is the following:
- Make sure you nofollow any links that you don’t directly control
- Avoid using static link-farms like directories, like linking to every blog in your network from every page
- Don’t let your commenters add links to their sites
Here’s an example of the link distribution of my site after I’ve properly annotated some links with nofollow:
The green areas (header, footer, content, and some meta data) represent regular links, the red areas (advertising, sidebar links, tags, and related stories) are nofollow links, and the blue areas are dynamic links (javascript widgets) which don’t need updating. I am not sure if I want to nofollow anything else–what do you think?
Update: Forbes weighs in, “it could also be Google simply taking into account the growth of the Internet.”
| This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 10:53 am and is tagged with link distribution, header footer, google, meta data, loop hole, static link, percent difference, silicon valley, page don, pagerank, commenters, interesting tidbit, page rank, good job, decreases, news sources, large scale, tens, shock, apple weblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
On October 23rd we have a pagerank change from 0 to 2 on our blog tus-hasede.blogspot.com. So there could have been a small update on that day. Does anybody know if small updates will replace the general big update?
Despite the fact that I got hit with a penalty, I think my Sandcastles approach works better. I can have links followed from my comments, and trackbacks.
Good community encourages links more than being stingy, and people who comment subscribe.
[...] Elliot describes a possible solution – by loading your non-important hyperlinks with the nofollow tag. He shows how he now distributes links throughout his website. [...]
I saw the phenomenon as it was coming yesterday. I was looking at the datacenters and saw the PR variances. Mine went down 2 PR points. I have a lot of no follows on my site as well but I still got hit.