Google swings Page Rank sword at blog networks and link sellers who pass PR |
A fascinating move by Google (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) that appears punitive for blog networks excessively crosslinking (B5Media and AOL/Weblogs) as well as some of the bloggers and, get this, mainstream media sites, who sell text links and don’t use rel=nofollow or JavaScript. Some are speculating that this is also being extended to paid reviews and paid to blog sites.
Just check out a couple of well-known sites that had their page rank downgraded:
(AOL/WIN) Engadget - PR7 to PR5
(AOL/WIN) Joystiq - PR6 to PR4
(AOL/WIN) AutoBlog - PR6 to PR4
(B5) Problogger - PR6 to PR4
Search Engine Journal - PR7 to PR4
And I’m sure you’ve heard of these sites:
Seattle Times - PR6 to PR4
Forbes - PR7 to PR5
Washington Times - PR6 to PR4
Notes: daily blog tips has more. Andy Beard who founded the NoNofollow group at Bumpzee has a nice write-up on the topic with a few more listed. Andy’s Page Rank was slashed awhile back and is a PayPerPost blogger.
Curious if former frontman of Weblogs, Inc, Jason Calacanis, has weighed in on this situation? Nothing on his blog as of this writing, nothing in his Twitter stream. He’s not on Skype at the moment or I’d ping him there. I’d like to know how he feels about this since he was a direct beneficiary in the sale to AOL of network crosslinking. Check the comments below. Maybe he’ll leave an answer there.
Acquistion by AOL not the case for the B5Media network, they have to weather the storm. Except for Duncan Riley who managed to get through a post at his TechCrunch writing gig entitled “Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms” without mentioning he used to be one of the partners at B5Media and departed somewhat suddenly.
Lately B5Media CEO Jeremy Wright’s personal blog (PR4 now, don’t know what it was formerly) is filled with daily unrelated Twitter updates (offtopic: lame, can’t people just follow these on Twitter, Jeremy?), no word on the B5Media blog about this Google situation either. B5Media company line is silence? I doubt that. When I interviewed Jeremy about B5Media last year it struck me that they had some good things planned over there. Is this a noteworthy setback?
Darren Rowse puzzledly addresses the issue in the comments section of his Problogger blog:
At b5 we link to other blogs in a channel in our sidebars - so that people can find more content on similar topics - it’s about giving readers more content that they can use and showing them what else we do. If it helps with SEO I guess I could see why they might disallow the power of such links - but to penalize for them is a little bizarre as they are a legit part of our business of showing people where they can read more content that we produce.
Is Darren legitimately confused or naive? Nepotism links on blog networks are essentially crosslink spam in the eyes of search engines. These links have been touted as a benefit for buildinig and running a blog network. It’s how crappy blogs like the ironically titled spam blog at Weblogs, Inc made the original CNET top 100 list, but were later replaced when CNET readers complained.
Fewer, higher quality blogs in blog network seems like better strategy
The Gawker blog network (Lifehacker, Gawker, Valleywag and others) seems to have a philosophy of fewer, higher quality blogs make a better overall network, but even they’ve had to shutter some blogs (Sploid, Screenhead) in the past.
B5Media is boasting over 290 blogs and 10 million unique visitors a month. Gawker does a lot more traffic than that with a dozen or so blogs. AOL has more traffic too, but with a number of blogs somewhere in the middle. Different blog network strategies.
Is it right for Google to punish sites that sell links passing PR?
I’m going to do something unusual in this post. Instead of giving you my opinion on this question, I’m going to request yours and carefully digest the answers. Long time readers know I’m not a big fan of blog networks and how writers work is treated (undervalued like most of the publishing industry), but this issue goes beyond blog networks.
I’m going to talk to other webmasters and bloggers in further depth on the issue. Let’s discuss this in the comments below, on Twitter, in your blogs, your place or mine, whatever.
Obviously these PR penalties are having no financial impact on Google. And some people are saying that the Page Rank isn’t that important any longer. Several of the sites having their PR reduced are fans of Google and follow their every move. Hmm, indeed!
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TDavid
I didn’t mention any former associations as simply I’m still under a legal agreement to not discuss them. I checked a range of blog networks but that company was not one of them as if they did indeed fit my theory I couldn’t use it. The Weblogs Inc down grade would seem to prove the theory though, and I’m still not convinced that this was about paid text links: there are too many sites that sell links that didn’t go down, and vice versa a number that don’t sell links that did. Having said that it may have played a part, but I’m not sure in which way at this stage: more likely that the relationship was part of a broader cross linking punishment, perhaps TLs being added to an overall link count that Google has flagged.
Comment by Duncan — October 24, 2007 @ 4:02 pm PST
Now Duncan that’s a very interesting response: “I’m still under a legal agreement to not discuss them” When does this agreement expire? Can you at least disclose that? I call dibs on the first interview with you the second that expires
Comment by TDavid — October 24, 2007 @ 4:09 pm PST
TDavid
I’m under a no-disparage agreement. No idea when it may end, I’m not sure it had an expiry date so I should check that, certainly it shouldn’t be forever, and it would certainly terminate is the company was to cease trading for example.
As I said though: I don’t see a conflict on this one, and if you check some of my previous TC posts you’ll see that I do frequently disclose stuff (and I also have some standard disclosures on the TC about page). I didn’t provide an opinion other than to report the news, and suggest that it may hurt some companies. I have zero idea as to how this may affect my former company, and to be quite honest given that I don’t follow any of their activities, I really don’t care a lot either. If (as you suggest) they have exposure to this then the only comment I would make is that it would be sad if a few of the folk writing blogs for that company are adversely affected financially by Google’s moves.
Comment by Duncan — October 24, 2007 @ 7:03 pm PST
Hey TDavid (and Duncan), long time no talk!
At this point data shows that this was largely a follow-on update to 2-weeks ago’ update on paid links. 2 weeks ago most of the big blog networks got off scott-free (including us, and Weblogs, Inc.). I’ll have more on this later today (travelling right now, as you can tell from my twitter reposting, heh), but the long and short is that internal contacts at Google are saying that the sites that weren’t selling text links that got hit were likely collateral damage in this war on text links.
As far as the impact to b5 from dropping text links (if we had to)? Fairly insignificant, it’s less than 10% of our revenue at this point, and with our own text-based ad platform (www.textpods.com) starting to find its legs, it’d likely be a hit for 3-4 months at worst.
In terms of reposting my twitter stuff, yeah, I’ve been meaning to move that to the sidebar for awhile
Finally, data from across the sites being hit shows *no* dip in Google traffic. It’s entirely likely that this was simply a warning. One we’ll be taking seriously, though we won’t be doing any knee-jerk reactions.
Comment by Jeremy Wright — October 25, 2007 @ 5:07 am PST
Thanks for the response, Jeremey, interesting stuff
RE: Twitter, I was following you for a little while on Twitter, but didn’t see any reciprocation so dropped you. Same thing for you, Duncan. If you guys want to reciprocate, then add me back and I’ll do the same. I prefer conversations, not one way situations.
Comment by TDavid — October 25, 2007 @ 5:31 am PST
Followed
Sorry, I ignore the follow notifications, it wasn’t intentional or personal at all 
Comment by Jeremy Wright — October 25, 2007 @ 5:34 am PST
You be followed too, thanks
Comment by TDavid — October 25, 2007 @ 5:38 am PST
[…] Google swings Page Rank sword at blog networks Has your pagerank dropped recently? TDavid writes a thoughtful post on changes to Google Page rank. It worth looking into if you want to optimize your blog. (tags: google pagerank SEO blogging tdavid) […]
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Pingback by Nomad’s Snippets: Hileud and Nurul, Google PageRank downgrade | nomad4ever — November 5, 2007 @ 2:37 am PST
I’m new to seo and have been told that the way to build trust, pr and links is by directory listings, but avoid links farms.
I do feel that so much hinges on serps and pr, that simply by sitting down and spending hours link building, is not really the”right way” to be a “trusted site”. Now we know it works……I don’t know any better way of setting a system up, but i still don’t think its right.
Comment by Tony Warne — December 7, 2007 @ 5:22 am PST
may i ask now to get a good pagerank? im a bit new so may somehow extract ideas from the pros like you
Comment by thirdworldgeek — January 21, 2009 @ 11:06 pm PST