If you have your own website(s), you may have noticed a couple of days ago that the PageRank (PR) of your site(s) changed. Yes, it’s that time again, when Google do a soft-shoe shuffle and change how things work.

What seems odd with this update is that established White Hat sites have lost PR whereas newer or Black Hat sites seem to have done pretty well.

If you’re not familiar with those terms, White Hat refers to sites that are built to provide quality content for visitors and are built and added to over time. Black Hat sites are built in a day (or less) and are made up of RSS feeds, scraped content and/or free or PLR articles. Black Hat sites are designed to make money from Adsense and/or affiliate marketing. The idea is not to worry about the quality of any one site but to build 10s, 100s or 1000s of them. While each site may only make between $0.20 and $0.50 per day on average, having lots of ‘em means the money adds up.

My own White Hat sites have all dropped in PR by one which is frustrating. My youngest site is 2 years old, my oldest is 10 year old. That was a PR6 site. Actually before the PR update earlier this year, it was a PR7 site.

I’ve been experimenting with Black Hat sites for the past couple of months and all those sites have had PR added. Almost all of those sites have only one or two incoming links, yet some of them have gone up to PR4.

Looking around the forums, a lot of established sites have taken similar hits, sites such as WashingtonPost.com, Forbes.com and ProBlogger.com. Some of these sites were PR7 and have now dropped to PR5, scores of PR6 sites have now dropped to PR4 and so on.

So what has Google done and why?

At this point, we can only speculate until Google actually tell us something (which they may never do). One opinion doing the rounds is that such sites have been singled out by Google because they were using their high PageRank scores to sell links and have been punished as a result. This doesn’t quite square with how my own sites were affected.

True, I have sold ad-space on some of my sites using Text Link Ads. But not on all of them. And even those sites that don’t sell adspace of any description still got demoted.

Others are speculating that all Google has done is reduce the PR value that appears in the PageRank graphic that’s part of the Google Toolbar you can add into your browser. Site positions in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) don’t appear to be affected (at least so far) and so the thinking is that perhaps Google are firing a shot across the bow of those who do sell links on their websites.

Another idea being posited, and it’s then one I think is most likely, is that Google has made some change in the way they fundamentally calculate a website’s PageRank. Google have never made public how they calculate rankings and Search Engine Optimization experts love second-guessing what metrics Google use to determine it.

It’s possible that Google have become disenchanted with the amount of link selling going on as such links can be used to pass PR juice from one site to the next, thereby upping its PR very quickly. So a site’s PR becomes more about how many high-PR sites link to it rather than the quality of content actually on the site. And, as we all know, Google states that they love quality content sites. Google have also stated that they don’t like link selling. Which is a bit hypocrital of them since they sell links themselves. Anyway, how can Google distinguish between a link that a webmaster is being paid to display, a link that’s a reciprocal link with another site or a one-way link to a site that the webmaster thinks will be useful to his readers? Maybe Google are being just a little heavy-handed?

Folks familiar with search engine optimisation (SEO) think that maybe Google thought there were too many high-PR sites out there and have devalued a large number of sites so that high-PR sites have some meaning again. So today’s PR4 sites are the equivalent of last week’s PR5’s.

Whatever the real reason behind Google’s latest PR update, I’m pretty sure they’re enjoying having let the cat out amongst the pidgeons. Maybe when they get bored (and all that’s left are feathers), they’ll let us know what they did and why…

…but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

How have your sites fared?

adsense, affiliate marketing, black hat, google, Google Stuff, quality content

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Share This  |  Email It  |  Print It  |  Subscribe to It!
This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Google Stuff. 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.