Pagerank Update, end of October 2007

Finally, the waited so long pagerank update, happened. But not all the webmaster are actually glad of this last update:

3 Surprises In The Google PageRank Update (source: www.searchnewz.com/topstory - Google News)
Eric Enge, 2007-10-29

The big news remains the apparent punishment in PageRank terms of sites which are selling links. What surprises me about this is not that Google did this, but three other things:

1: It surprises me that they missed so many sites that are obviously selling links. I am aware of many, many such sites that monetize their sites in that fashion, without NoFollowing their links. Given the set of sites affected, it really does seem like the punishment was manually selected. However, that makes it even more curious when you consider that influencers like Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal were selected.

2: It surprises me that they punished sites that sell links, but clearly labelled them as Sponsored, or as Advertisers, or some other equivalent. Google will never win that battle. Monetizing sites is something that every site owner has the right to do. Such a small percentage of site owners even know what a NoFollow is, that a policy of punishing people on that basis does not make sense to me. Besides which, cant Google detect these types of clear labels and simply discount those links algorithmically?

3: It was also a surprise that there was no apparent impact on traffic. This was reported by both Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal. So given the broad swipe that they took at sites as mentioned in point 2 above, I suppose that this is a good thing. But simply altering tool bar page rank in a way that does not impact traffic will get them nowhere. The link selling market will continue to thrive without PageRank. At this point in time, selling links is more about Anchor Text than PageRank. Nothing in this update has changed that.

I think the right strategy for Google is to focus on the sites that are clearly being manipulative, and implement penalties on them that include an affect on traffic. Then Google should be able to address people who clearly label their sold links as ads algorithmically, by simple discounting their links. Sure this may be subject to error, but I would think that the outcry on that score would be far less significant than what they generated with the approach they used.

What do you think about it?

Selling links can damage your PageRank or SERP position on Google

Seems that Google is definitively feed up of sites made only for pagerank selling. The keyword "buy pagerank" was been a lot penalized through the first weeks of October 2007, and the websites which were selling PR find out a level or two of decrease in their pagerank. And what with the SERP (Search engine results page) position? (Quotes from the article of Danny Sullivan (October 7, 2007 - source: http://searchengineland.com/071007-173841.php)

[...] Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.

[...] Google says that most people hit with a PageRank decrease will likely notice this, and then they can request a review.

[...] Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.

[...] Ironically, despite the move, Google itself will still allow paid links to be promoted in another way -- through its own ads.

Google Website Optimizer (beta)

- Free landing page optimization tool -
Website Optimizer, Google's free multivariate and A/B testing tool, helps
online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor
satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content
(text and images).

- Website Optimizer is a free tool inside AdWords
View the overview demo: http://services.google.com/training/websiteoptimizeroverview/ [copy and
paste in your browser]

Where is the pagerank update?

I Think that many of you wondered that question, at least once in the last months.
This is the longest time between updates in the history of TBPR (ToolBar PageRank). The last one was on April 28, 2007. And, making some counts, more than 140 days ago. Strange?

Many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert does not have interest in PR anymore, but a big piece of the make money online, or internet business, are still aimed on pagerank. Make some research on google and you'll see by yourself.

"As far as the toolbar PageRank, I definitely wouldn't expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess.", Says Matt Cutts (Google software engineer) - this on September 12, 2007

We'll see...

[ Check out the Data Center of your site, if you have one, or your favorite sites. ]