Comments on: Google swings Page Rank sword at blog networks and link sellers who pass PR

By: Tony Warne

Tony Warne — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:22:34 +0000

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.

By: Nomad’s Snippets: Hileud and Nurul, Google PageRank downgrade | nomad4ever

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:37:18 +0000

[…] a Philippine site and some more site downgrades, while here are some more in-depth thoughts and ideas regarding Big G’s latest restructuring and the possible strategies behind […]

By: links for 2007-11-01 | stuart henshall

links for 2007-11-01 | stuart henshall — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 08:26:34 +0000

[…] 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) […]

By: TDavid

TDavid — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:38:04 +0000

You be followed too, thanks

By: Jeremy Wright

Jeremy Wright — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:34:07 +0000

Followed Sorry, I ignore the follow notifications, it wasn’t intentional or personal at all

By: TDavid

TDavid — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:31:31 +0000

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.

By: Jeremy Wright

Jeremy Wright — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:07:15 +0000

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.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 02:03:03 +0000

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.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:09:10 +0000

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

By: Duncan

Duncan — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:02:56 +0000

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.