Google PR Shakedown
The blogging community has been rocking the past few days with news of many of the Internet’s biggest, brightest and best blog sites being hit with what appears to be a PR penalty. Sites have dropped PageRank quicker than Gary Glitter dropped fans in the wake of what many bloggers believe is some Google imposed penalty.
But is it really a penalty from Google? I mean, yes sites have dropped in PageRank, including Just Search (we’ve gone from a PR6 to a PR5) but it hasn’t had any detrimental effect on SERPs. Indeed, while bloggers are rightly concerned that their little green bars are slightly less green in much the same way as the Incredible Hulk is when he’s on the comedown, they have accepted the fact that visible toolbar PR isn’t quite the be all and end all it once was.
No one appears to be losing listings, so what does it all mean and why was it done?
Popular theories circulating around the net include:
Google has penalised website that have removed Adsense code.
Well I can say with some degree of certainty that this is not the case. I personally have sites crammed full of Adsense, and as my last blog showed, make Google a fair amount of revenue in that department, yet my sites have still been docked a bit of green. It’s not Adsense related.
Google has penalised sites for selling links.
Sites like www.johnchow.com sell links, and he’s been knocked some PR. Google is against selling links, we all know that. They’ve made it very clear the last few months. However, again I have many sites that don’t sell links, indeed Just Search doesn’t sell links, yet again our green has been depleted by daddy Google.
Google is cracking down on sites that cross link on the same IP.
Ah, now I must confess I do this a little bit. I have started to split it up lately and am running 3 different servers on different IP addresses, so any linking between sites of my own couldn’t be tracked in this way. I do still have some sites on the same IP linking to each other though, so perhaps this could be a valid reason?
I won’t dispute that cross linking could be a factor, but to be honest I think it’s more likely that there are simply more websites out there. PR is relative between sites, the more sites there are, the more links you’d require to be sufficiently better ‘kitted up’ to achieve a higher PR than the next site. Consequently there’s been some continental plate shifting in Google Earth’s crust, causing sites to be re-evaluated.
I think the conspiracy theories of Google manually going round all of the Internet’s most successful blogs and handing out some PageRank SmackDown! might be a little farfetched.
How has your website faired in this latest shake-up? Whether you’ve gone green or not, remember that the PR isn’t the goal, it’s a means to an end. However many links you have, what your PR is or indeed where you rank in Google for different phrases are means to an end. What truly matters is how much traffic you’re getting, is that traffic converting and are you making sales?
If the answer to those questions is a resounding positive then forget about your little green bar. You’ll be just fine.
Darren
Affiliate Marketing
