Google PageRank - The Day After

Unless you slept through yesterday or perish the thought, actually did something other than sit in front of your computer, you will know that Google finally rolled out it's long awaited Pagerank update.

For the past two weeks Google has been devaluing the pagerank of a lot of big name sites - another major Google slap as it were. The blogosphere moaned and called Google every nasty name in the book for imposing what is thought to be a penalty on everybody selling links without using the no-follow tag. Another theory is that the penalty was applied to everybody that belonged to link networks like weblogs inc. etc. I say theory as with everything Google, nobody really knows since Google ain't tellin'. (see a word to the wise below)

Yesterday Google reversed course and began dishing out it's new rankings and suddenly there was Google love everywhere. Hordes of formally PR0 sites suddenly found themselves blessed with PR2's and 3's and even the penalized sites saw some or all of their pagerank returned - adding ever more confusion and mystery to the internet God known as the Google Algorithm.

I didn't bother posting yesterday as there was no shortage of posts elsewhere and I was busy checking out the results of my own little empire. In the end what I found was more or less what I expected - my websites dropped - my static blogs remained about the same and my core money blogs all rose fairly dramatically. All in all I wasn't that surprised as I knew what the results would be long before Google posted them.

No I don't have an insider at Google. I knew from observing what was happening on my stat counter over the past month. My websites have more or less been neglected by me as they require a great deal of work compared to blogs and really don't rank as well as blogs on the search engines even when maintained. I should qualify this and mention I am talking about Niche websites only. Niche blogs free or hosted have been kicking butt for some time now. My website stats have showed declining traffic as a result of lower serp's for my main keywords for a while now and this told me that my sites were on the way down as far as pagerank was concerned.

In regards to my blogs I have a large group that I post sporadically to - in most cases I worked them onto page 1 of the serp's just to find out that there wasn't a lot of money to be made from them and have since kept them at a status quo - they make a few bucks but not enough to get me excited. They have not fallen or risen in the serp's for some time now and I didn't expect any PR changes and I didn't get any.

My core blogs - this one included have been climbing the serp's steadily for the past few months and this above all told me that they would receive a much higher PR after the update and they did - this blog jumped from a 2 to a 5. The fact is this blog has been a PR5 for a while now - it was only yesterday that the little green bar changed to reflect this fact.

I don't want to rain on everybody's parade but you should realize something - your site will not perform better today than it did last week. If your little green bar is higher today it means that your site has been performing at that level for a while now. Don't expect a jump in traffic now - you've already had it for some time now.

I received an email from one of my readers this morning and he wanted to know why his position in the search pages hadn't increased from yesterday. He went from a PR2 to a PR4. I asked him where he ranked currently - number 9 on page 1 for his main keyword. I asked him how long he has been in that position. 3 weeks he said. Where were you before that? Page 4 on Google he said. I told him that he became a PR4 3 weeks ago. Oh... he said.

This is not to say that PR is not important. It is for many reasons; you can command a higher $ from advertisers. You can also use your PR to send link love to new sites you create and help out your friends. Having a high PR will also make you more friends as well - people will pay attention to you as suddenly you MUST be doing something right. The higher your PR the more authority you will have regardless of whether this is true or not.

A word to the wise.

Google has publicly stated that paid links are a no-no and that it will crack down on this practice. In principle they have a valid point. To maintain the integrity of their search engine they want to present relevant quality sites in their serp's.

Pagerank is one of the methods they use (but not the ONLY method) to determine which pages rank at the top of the listings for any given search query. The problem they are facing is that people who may or may not have quality sites are artificially increasing their pagerank by buying links from sites that have a high pagerank. If you were to get a link from a PR7 site this could conceivably increase your site to a PR6 instantly - even if you had been a PR0. This would certainly increase your chances of being listed high in the search listings. Great except your site might be crap and you have lessened the search engine integrity.

There is a recent movement by bloggers to adopt a "do-follow" or "I-follow" approach when it comes to linking especially in regards to comments. The idea being that this will increase comments and hence readership if people can obtain links back to their own site by leaving comments on other sites. I was curious to see how Google would deal with this and it appears that they have left it alone in this latest update. They may well have devalued the link juice gained by comment backlinks but at least there don't appear to be any penalties handed out.

This can not be said about another recent trend in blogging - paid text ads and reviews. You are probably familiar with Text-Link-Ads, Review Me? and PayPerPost. A lot of bloggers are using these programs as a way to earn revenue on their sites.

I am just guessing but I think Text-Link-Ads is just about done as it exists solely for the purpose of buying and selling links that pass Pagerank on to others. A lot of sites that felt the recent Google slap had advertisements for this program on their home page. You might want to think about this before getting involved with it.

ReviewMe? and PayPerPost may survive but they may have to become advertising and consulting programs only. Currently you can make money by being paid to review someone else's site on your site. Google doesn't have a problem with this as long as you include the "no-follow" tag in the paid link. The problem is that most people paying for a review are asking high PR sites for the review with the knowledge that they will get a backlink from the high PR site that doesn't contain the "no-follow" tag. This is the whole premise behind these programs at the moment as exemplified by the fact that the higher your PR the more you can charge for a review.

This will soon stop or the reviewer sites will see their pagerank diminished by Google. In the end you will have to have a high traffic site to really make money selling reviews using a "no-follow". This will hurt a lot of high PR yet low traffic sites that currently sell reviews as no one will want to pay them for a backlink that doesn't have any benefit other than sending a low amount of traffic.

If you use these programs I can't tell you which way to go but the latest Google crackdown on paid links should give you pause about whether to use the "no-follow" tag or not.

That said those of you who gained PR this go-round enjoy your little green bar and hopefully we can all make money from it without pissing off Google in the process.

Oh.. if you gained a high PR you may notice a sudden increase in spam comments - gotta love those spammers. Do any of these clowns actually make money or do they just enjoy annoying the rest of us?

Cheers,

Grizzly