Pagerank Tanks for Several High Profile Sites

• Posted by Badi Jones on October 24th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

Seems that while I wasn’t looking, there was a pagerank update. I was looking for ranks to go up, but Google has actually rolled out an update where pagerank was actually lowered for a lot of sites. I realized this last night, while listening to an episode of the Daily Searchcast. Danny Sullivan seems to suggest that this might be some sort of penalty given only to sites that sell links. If so, then this is a pretty huge event. A a lot of high profile sites have been hit.

seroundtable.com (-3) PR7 to PR4
engadget.com (-2) PR7 to PR5
problogger.net (-2) PR6 to PR4
copyblogger.com (-2) PR6 to PR4
tuaw.com (-2) PR6 to PR4
johnchow.com (-2) PR6 to PR4
andybeard.eu (-2) PR5 to PR3

If Google truly has based this PR reduction on sites that are selling links, I wonder if it is going to affect traffic. If not, then it’s probably not really a big deal, but if they are, I really hope they’ve done it in a way that differentiates between clearly labeled banners and sponsored links, and links that are meant to pass Pagerank.

Selling ad space, including links and banners, has become one of the best ways to monetize a site, and it doesn’t make sense to penalize people for doing it.

I haven’t found out if rankings are actually being hurt, but you can read more about this here.

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