PageRank: Acting Brand New - The Bad continued
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For those that are still wondering why Google seems to be bashing the PR of blog link farms, consider that it is perfectly normal in other venues. Standards and Poor and the Fitch agency give credit ratings all the time -- and believe me, it is only an opinion. When they change their opinion, it makes it harder for the company which has been downgraded to access credit. According to a recent post by Danny Sullivan on PageRank:
It's Google's search engine. They have every right to say that if you sell links, they might penalize you.
Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular point of argument. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don't want to be harmed in Google? Don't sell links.
The situation according to Danny is a war ("jihad" anybody?) between paid links and AdSense, and for now, the bigger Google is taking the paid link sites to the cleaners. Just ask the editors of www.daily.stanford.edu, who saw their PageRank drop to five from nine, or the gurus at textlinkads.com, whose fall is documented here at daily moolah. Now the bloggers at Pay-per-post have seen their bubble burst after months of warnings.
The biggest situation is still that of Pay-per-post. The web site just went off beta. I have never used them personally but I saw the merits in their operating model. Perhaps full disclosure would be preferred on the side of the bloggers so that readers will know when they are writing content about a sponsored page or if they are financially unbiased towards the product been previewed.
However, with the PageRank of bloggers on Pay-per-post getting slammed, it is possible that the entire business model may be compromised. If the bloggers' advertisers see the PageRank of their sites as essential, or if Google goes one step further and starts pulling the blogs from their SERPs, it could result in mass flight. Hopefully such a horrible thing won't happen. Pay-per-post has switched to an Alexa ranking scale so that its model is disconnected from Google's PageRank, but it seems possible that Google SERP trouble will eventually affect the Alexa ranking of these sites.
The Way Out?
Google PageRank is over-hyped. If Google really wants to reduce the amount of sites which sell paid links based on PR, they should stop showing sites their PageRank. Until then both the innocent, who sell text links on their web sites for income, and the guilty -- you have to ask Google to define who those are -- will be punished. Until Google's dance and PR updates stop being studied with the intensity of a US Fed chairman's announcement, there will be no end to the amount of drama that will ensue because history will always repeat itself.
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