Matt Cutts has confirmed through an email to Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal that the recent PageRank adjustments were the result of Google’s campaign against paid links.
The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.
Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank
If you don’t know what PageRank is, PageRank is a scale created by Google to measure the importance of a web page determined by the number of quality links to a page. The higher the number of links, the higher the PageRank. This has caused a market for buying and selling links to ‘manipulate’ PageRank.
Warning and Action
Google has warned about paid links before and last week it started the clean up. So far, I have seen many sites’ PageRank go down and up in the past few days. Copyblogger went down to a PR4 to PR7 and Problogger has regained its PR6. This has cause confusion since both sites have not been selling links. Speculations were soaring from PR scale adjustment to paid links until now.
PinoyMoneyTalk has a list of known Philippine website and their recent PR updates.
The Future?
Although I doubt that Google can identify a site that has paid links, will we still see bloggers who’d risk it? I have a few questions I have about the future of blogging and web publishing. Daily Blog Tips has given their glimpse of the future.
- Google will continue on the warpath against paid linking
- Paid linking will go further underground
- PageRank will become meaningless
- Google will demolish trust between link buyers and sellers
- In the end, Google will emerge victorious
Do you think Paid Links selling will continue even after Google’s clean up?
Tags: google
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Thanks for the mention there Teejay. On paid links, I believe it will still continue since it is a big industry and one that pays well. (A lot of websites use text-link-ads as one of their main income source) But like you said there, it will go underground. Well, it already has. A lot of private text link sales has been happening at forums like sitepoint.
Yes. I also believe it has already happened however, a lot of publishers (TLA) did not take Google’s warnings seriously.
We will have to wait and see the effect PageRank value will do to advertising in the future.
This was well thought out. Paid links will still continue as advertisers will not rely on PageRank but more on SERPS, and as you’ve mentioned above, who knows in the near future, PR could be dead by then.
Anyways, congratz to me, yay! 2 of my sites went from pr 0 to pr 3 and my directory went up from pr 1 to pr 2. I’ll be celebrating while PR is still an important part of a sites value . Google’s not that bad after all. ^^
Congratulations to you John Breo. My own blog, blog.webmasterforumph.com went up from a zero to three.
Btw, I hear link prices have gone higher now.
[…] heard my prayers and gave all of my sites PR. Although some blogs and websites have their PR down. I have mine ranked […]
Their recent clampdown only spells one thing on my mind - biased.. famous sites aren’t penalized - why? they do sell links on their blog - it’s just that they put ’sponsors’ and link it through an image file.. it’s still guilty..
this is how google practices double standard.. they should be sued over this..
[…] Do you Sell Links? The PR Adjustments Explanation […]