Yes, it’s a hard truth that Google is cutting to sizes the page ranks of many websites on the basis of some judgments done by their team. Not just the high on spam websites! Even the big names in the internet and real world haven’t been spared by Google. This untimely act of Google has left many heads turning and has been followed by a gush of speculations on how and why the things must have gone about. Some of the page rank plagued websites are www.adobe.com (10 to 9), www.w3.org, www.nfs.gov, www.whitehouse.gov (10 to 9), www.problogger.net, www.autoblog.com (6 to 4) and so on.

Why did it all happen?
Page ranks or PR is the cumulative score of a webpage indicating its worth or value of usefulness on the basis of Google’s indigenous algorithm. A higher page rank implies a more useful website for the user and thus, the website bags a place in the top slot of the search engine, when typed by its keyword. There are many ways to fetch the coveted page rank. Some preferred to toil all the way to top, while many just played smart with the black hat marketing. Backlinks plays a pivotal role in the page ranks. The backlinks to a website had a major hand in the page rank score-A backlink from a reputed website (as per Google’s frame of reference!) has more value than another from a less reputed one.

It shouldn’t come as a complete surprise for internet savvy users to hear about the selling of links to increase the page ranks! It was quite common to see a fellow or a smart female talk of ‘how she made money’ or ‘how you can make money’ by purchasing few links of theirs, for some dollars. It fetched good returns for many of its purchasers and thus, an entire guild of websites put their money on it.
Being quite an open secret, it was sure that Google would come up with something to stop the false grading of page ranks and here they did! Most of the websites that suffered a tumble down in the page ranks were those who were involved in the selling/purchasing of such links. But is it all? No! Websites like www.problogger.net are clean in that matter, but perhaps their network of blogs/websites somewhere down the line has massive interlinking!  That’s another reason to watch out!

The message from Google is loud and clear. Don’t indulge in link selling/purchasing and further avoid links to web spammers and bad neighborhood, as even that may lead to a decrease in your page rank.  This make Online Advertising much difficult then before.

What’s the solution?

The solution is to remove the paid links and similar text link ads from your website and submit a reconsideration request to Google as a message to them that you are now in full cohesion with their guidelines. Another solution would be to just move on! Does the Google PR really matter if your website is that damn good or needed for a user? Google slammed www.whitehouse.gov with a plummet in its PR. Does anyone see a gross effect in anything with that? So, the PR may be of great value to some, a little less to few and much lesser to few more. Check your priorities and have your say!

Tags: adobe, autoblog, backlink, Directories, gov, link submission, nfs, PageRank, PageRank Loss, PageRank Update, PR, problogger, w3, w3.org, whitehouse

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 6:40 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.