PageRank update sweeps across the Web
There’s been a lot going on in the past days regarding PageRank changes. Google has decided to follow through on their promise to combat paid links and sites selling links. The main effect is a significant drop in PageRank, which is probably a way to reduce value for paid links (if they indeed are sold solely on the basis of high PageRank) and discourage webmasters to purchase links, although there seems to be no changes regarding anchor text. Google has done a few things to stir things up and many are suffering. It seems that not only sites with paid links have been affected. There is also speculation that Google is also hitting on sites with excessive cross-linking, although they may simply be reducing the value of certain groups of links. With every major change such as this, the innocent are bound to get burned as well. Some sites have experienced drops and other negative changes even without having bought or sold links, while others who engage in these practices have not been affected at all. Indeed, there are surprises in this Google update. Many of the sites that were affected are well known and popular authority sites in their own content category.
Google has flexed some muscle, and the effect is pulsating across the Web. Sites that depend solely on traffic sent by Google are definitely going to feel the change. Sites that did nothing wrong, but were still affected, should work on broadening their promotion efforts to include other sources of traffic such as social networks, community sites and other search engines. If a site depends solely on Google for traffic than a major change like this will definitely have a very negative effect on site and business performance. Good news is that, so far, there seems to be little change in traffic, although if changes prove to be related to overall ranking as well, changes in traffic will probably happen.
This blog was PageRank 0 until yesterday, now it’s PR 2 (at the time of writing, who knows about tomorrow). BTW, it was PR 2 a couple of weeks ago, for about two days. Was that the beginning of this PageRank update and I missed it? What I’m trying to illustrate is that pagerank obsession is a waste of time, unless you sell links based on this criterion.
