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?
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