A hypothetical I feel is worth a mention. Everyone is so worried about Google and their idiotic pagerank changing, but lets look at the big picture here people. It’s all about where you’re listed in the search results. Lets say your company name is TechCrunch and you’re selling or buying text links. According to the “official confirmation” Google is cracking down on people. Right now it’s just the lowering of Pagerank and some are worried it will result in where they’re listed in the SERPs.
With that in mind, think about how many people have been hit with this change. Imagine all of these sites, Problogger, TechCrunch, John Chow, Weblogs Inc and so on then get penalized as people are worried about. Think about how horrible the search results will be for Google. They are aiming to make their search results better? If I search for a specific company name and they don’t show up in the first page, what is so great about their results? Just because they are crying about webmasters trying to make their online businesses better? I can guarantee you the search results will produce what you’re looking for at Yahoo, MSN or Ask. They don’t seem to be bullying webmasters and pulling money out of their pockets.
***UPDATE***
I forgot to leave this example. If you go to Google and search for “John Chow“, look at the results! Not quite what you’re looking for, right? How does that make results better?
11 comments ↓
Couldn’t agree more. No one spends money buying links or reviews trying to rank for anything other than relevant search terms. It’s like Google and the Google-philes think we’re all trying to get porn sites ranked for knitting terms. If a mortgage site wants to rank for “mortgages”, isn’t that a good thing?
Not if you sell the top 3 search results as sponsored listings. All this is about is Google trying to eliminate competition for advertising dollars. If a mortgage company can get a page-one ranking without paying Google for it, Google needs to crush the facilitators that make this happen.
While Google may have won this battle, the fact of the matter is that direct text link ads from the bottom of homepages, or site wide links are only a SMALL part of any optimization effort. Maybe sites have been devalued, and perhaps some will lose a little positioning because their anchor texts were also devalued on the violating sites.
But, there are other marketing techniques that one can use to bounce back quite quickly from this.
I’ll plug a product that we love to use, LinkArt. This is an absolute MONSTER of an optimization tool. It’s fresh content, fresh links and posted on third-party website(s). The beauty here is that if your content is unique each time you submit, you’re going to be generating a butt-ton of incoming, relevant links on your preferred anchors. And there’s nothing that a major engine can do to stop it. This marketing technique is totally legit from the standpoint of SEM and SEO!
The exact same thing can be accomplished with LinkArt or LinkPost, as can be accomplished with direct text link ads.
Additionally, in-content links (LinkInTxt) is something we have been using as well, and these seem to be a powerful mechanism, and something that all webmasters should consider.
The way i see it is that if Google went this far to stop “paid links” then their algorithms are not as strong as we were led to believe. It seems nothing else worked for them, so they had to nuke anyone who facilitates this type of marketing technique. However, I firmly believe that the exact same techniques that made Direct Text Links a powerful SEO tool will work for techniques like LinkArt, LinkPost and LinkinTxt.
It’s another Google evolution. and we, as small businesses and marketers must also evolve. Just as we have done for the last 5 years.
MegaD
http://www.PrivateWebsiteURLsoIdon‘tGetBannedbyGoogleForHatingOnThem.com
yeah, I personally dont really care about this issue. I dont think pagerank is the only way to measure web/blog quality. I have 2 blog with 5 pagerank with only 2 unique visitor daily
For me the issue, like WICKO, is relevance. I don’t really care what Google does as long as the results stay relevant.
I think this is the begining of the end of paid links. No one cares about Pagerank anymore but Google is starting something against paid links and they might start baning sites using this technique. I don’t know the story about the John Chow website but if it disapeared from Google search results because of paid links that’s not about Google’s results being bad but a big problem for the site’s owner.
What kind of traffic can you get from Yahoo MSN or Ask if 80% or more surfers use Google?
Google is the first search engine and soon they will control the entire world wide web.
What if we all get together and start baning Google on our computers?
I have about 60+ sites and blogs. After this receint change at google, most of my sites have been hit pretty hard with loss of PR. At this point I don’t know if there is also a loss of traffic, but I think there may be some.
So far, what I have seen and hear indicate that the change in PageRank is more cosmetic than anything else. I think Aarron Wall said he did not see any change in traffic numbers, just PR.
PageRank is not too big of a deal in general, but where it is a big deal is with people buying links on some of our sites. We sell links on about half of them, but we have sites without paid links that have been hurt as bad or worse than the ones that do. Without PR, average users have little to guide them for buying links. I hope they start looking to Alexa, because I can get those numbers looking pretty good in short order.
LW publishers that use file inclusion have the scarlet letter of “lw” in our page code. This should be addresses ASAP so that we are not so easy to identify.
I see this as a battle with Google over the right to make use of the value of links. Google and others have placed value on linking, but they don’t want us to profit from it. That’s wrong. The only way to do battle is for paid links to be difficult or impossible to tell from non-paid links. We will either maintain our ability to use and profit from linking, or linking will decrease in value overall.
It looks like they did another round of penalizing today.
[...] Is this got something to do with the new implementation of Google Adsense? Or just simply Google is penalizing bloggers? [...]
I have gone from a 0 to a 6….from 0 to a 5 from 0 to a 4 then it went to 2…..so try an figure all that out. Content is king….RSS subscribers mean traffic…and pagerank is overrated
Congrats! This shows everyone that the PR update wasn’t just the lowering of everyone, it was an actual algo update that adjusted PR as a whole.
I bet google’s PR didn’t change.
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