Webmasters Breathing PageRank

Just few months ago the biggest buzz and even fear among the webmasters was when Google started taking actions against the link sellers and buyers. Statement after which shortly many big blogs got penalized in PageRank going down from PR7 to PR4 or even in worst cases wiping the pagerank completely from PR5 to PR0.

The reason for Google to take action against those that do sell textual links without the nofollow tag was (as publicly announced) that selling or acquiring links without the nofollow tag purpose is to trick the search engines algorithm and obtain better search engine rankings. The search engines algorithm is made so that websites are being ranked based on votes (links pointing to a website with their main keywords in anchor text).

From link selling/buying business many would profit, one would be the link buyer who with the help of the acquired links would rank higher in the SERPs for his/her targeted keyword. The second person that would profit is the link seller who would earn money from the text links he would sell (or from the blog reviews that the webmaster is going to sell).

Apparently Google did not liked that their algorithm was being tricked, or didn’t liked that webmasters could make profits out of their algorithm by selling textual links, how ever it is Google decided that those webmasters (sites) that do sell textual links deserve to be punished and penalized. This took act with decrease in PageRank for websites that was mainly using the next marketplaces

• Text Link Ads
• Review Me
• PayPerPost
• SponsoredReviews

Webmasters that had their websites listed in the marketplace of one of those websites got their pagerank practically wiped, white..

Did this penalization stopped webmasters from selling textual links? Well I can tell you that it didn’t, as I mentioned in the previous post on around the web and back, Paul had highlighted pretty well that the link sales business is not over yet and he is right. Not only that the link selling business didn’t stopped, but actually prices increased since the risk was higher which was not bad at all for the webmasters that were making a living out of this business.

Those tho that got penalized, what were they doing? Well just a small amount of them did actually stopped writing reviews or selling text links after the penalization. The big amount tho continued and what they did was changing the methods to measure the quality of their site from previously based on PageRank to

• Traffic stats (finally they started publishing stats)
• Alexa Ranking
• RSS Feed readers number

In addition they started to even include testimonials to enforce their advertising page and to give more credibility to their site.

Breathing PageRank

Now as you see there was a PageRank update just yesterday, and the results are definitively what people wouldn’t expect. Many of the previously penalized websites started breathing PageRank again and can see their PR bar go green, even for just a few points but at least it is not white.

You might thinking that Google gave up on all this? Well you might be even right, or maybe I am just paranoid thinking that this is just a tactic to get in surface more webmasters that do this type of business. Or maybe it is just that Google has came up with another algorithm that won’t hurt your pagerank but definitively cuts out the value of the links that are going out from your site…? i don’t know…if you have an idea comment bellow.

If you liked this post subscribe to my RSS feed or have the post delivered via email in your inbox.

Sharing is caring!