A major Google page rank update has punished large scale blog link farms and similar sites indulging in heavy cross linking by dramatically cutting their Google page rank scores.
There is some suggestion that the changes may be related to the sale of text link ads, but at this stage this is not backed by evidence, and a range of sites I checked that are selling text link ads were showing no change in page rank.
The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.
Blogs in the TechCrunch network (we don’t link heavily on each page..nor do we have a particularly large network) and the Gawker Media network (who like us don’t go nuts with links) maintained their page rank whilst blogs across a range of other networks saw big decreases. The AOL owned Weblogs Inc was not immune, with leading Gadget blog Engadget dropping from PR 7 to PR5, Autoblog (6 to 4) and DownloadSquad (5 to 4).
The move by Google could well cause many smaller blog networks, including a number with funding, to close given their heavy reliance on text link ads and related sales that depend on strong Google page ranks for each site. Although traffic alone can and does sell ads on bigger sites, a drop from say PR7 to PR4 in one example makes the ad sell that much more difficult, particularly on blogs with little traffic. I’d suggest that the Deadpool will soon see a number of new entrants.
It was about time. One thing our engine will never do is let people cheat. Any type of automation or duplication by syndication should not be counted in page rankings. Neither should artificial in/outlinking in site networks be counted. Page rank should automatically remove any inlinking within company sites within the same network. How? Build a database of them and let users add and moderate it.
They don’t even need outside help, they have 15k employees that could build this anti-cheater database from within. Lame Google, LAME that it took you THIS LONG.
Our engine will reward uniques and punish duplicators and link hogs.
“One thing our engine will never do is let people cheat.”
What engine do you speak of Chris?
heh, PR is really not as important as it once was, or even that important in general. there are like 500(?) cascading factors that go into the serps. Don’t ask me what they are though
–Richard
Anybody knows, when Google will recalulate PR for web sites?, I am waiting for it about 5 month. thanks.
Its good they stopped those RSS farms.
Yeah..any how I never relied on google for blog search.They are just not up to it.
I thought google stopped using PR some time ago?
Bad Headline.
Dawson
no, and it’s still heavily relied on by advertisers as a way to rank a sites work, particularly with smaller blogs.
SS: this is the second page rank update this month: first time I can ever remember there being a second one, so it’s fair to suggest that the second one is about cracking down on this: jihad seems to fit, given how wide spread the results appear to be.
“What engine do you speak of Chris?”
I’ve been spending the entire year holed up in my office building an engine to compete with other engines. Pretty soon we’re going to come out guns a blazing with a mini-search, then spring next year with the full web index with searches hot cached on a ridiculously large RAM memory array. I’ve officially changed my website link on here from the main site to my blog so people can stop asking me questions.
This post is about Google, let’s keep it that way. My comment was just to say, I would have done something sooner if I worked at Google. Now that Mark Lucovsky and the other guys from Microsoft are there, I bet google becomes retarded just like MS. Just you watch.
OK, JIHAD is a bit inflammatory given current the geo-political climate, wouldn’t you say? Moreover, it is really not used correctly – even the Westernized perversion of Jihad means “a holy war by muslims against non-muslims” … originally, it was a broader Struggle (intellectual, moral or physical)
And Chris @ Beerco – dude, give it a rest already. You are the assclown of this blog. Sit down, the teacher will not call on you.
So Jihad is the new catch phrase with you people huh! Pity you don’t understand the real meaning of it.
I guess that makes Google akin to the Taleban right? With the way you phrased your headline that’s what it looks like to me.
“dude, give it a rest already. You are the assclown of this blog. Sit down, the teacher will not call on you.”
k, whatever. I’ll remember that when people are buying up keywords, probably you included. Wait, I probably won’t. Weren’t you the guy that said that Yappd were winners for selling out?
Yeah…. the rest of us call that an “exit plan”. Look it up chief.
I agree with Duncan, the boys at Google are definitely on a Jihad here, and good for them. The infidels with nothing but reciprocals are next.
By the way, it seems there was no PR export, but a series of downward adjustments, i.e. downgrades for a lot of site. The real update is yet to come.
This development is good news for honest webmasters who have been building authentic websites with solid content, but have been trampled over in the SERP’s by lazy-ass morons with gazillions of ill-begotten inlinks.
Nick
P.S. Chris – Good luck pardner. Give ‘em hell.
Slappy, relax. One might make the same argument about the word “crusade,” but I don’t see Christians getting hot and bothered about people using “their word” when it’s not applied to a campaign to reconquer religious holy sites from a hostile religious force.
All this bloody political correctness. People, can we please relax and not bristle at vocabulary without a decent reason?
I dropped from a 4 to 3
As long as search engine results stay similar Im alright with it
This is a very strange change and it makes page rank even more opaque.
Before the change I had 3 sites that were all PR 5 (call them A, B and C – I fear big brother is watching). Site A is a site that approx 10k people enjoy daily (mostly return visits/word of mouth, no link farming). It has 10+ paid links. It’s PR remained at 5. Site B is a similar site with no paid links approx 10k visitors daily again mostly return visits/word of mouth, no link farming traffic and its page rank dropped to 3. Site C is a blog RSS directory linking to hundreds of blogs, many link back, and it receives only 200 hits a day. Its page rank has remained at 5.
I don’t value site C and I don’t think anyone else does either, except Google.
My opinion is that page rank has further lost meaning. I don’t think its used for search results anymore either. For me, it’s only an ego thing. It sucks to work hard and get slapped with a low rank.
Google is getting really big and is starting to move more than it can see.
I have a question, would you consider MyBlogLog a link farm? was it punish by Google?
I can’t believe you would just throw the word Jihad around like that. Is Google a fundamentalist muslim company? Did an Imam make a religious declaration? Are innocent people losing their lives because of a decision Google made? If the answer to any of these questions is NO, then you should retract the headline immediately out of respect for the many people who have lost their lives at the hands of real Jihad.
That is a really bad title for the story. There are at least 1000 words that you could have chosen instead of picking that one. I also agree with the comment towards chris ….add to the conversation not sell your ass on this blog. “first comment” would have been a funnier and far better comment. At least i would have looked atthe site and had a laugh about it …now i look and loath.
Duncan think before you post.
Where are you people getting these Pagerank figures from? Toolbar PR hasn’t updated for months.
Google is punishing link farms as well as anyone using text link ads or other systems that don’t follow rel=”nofollow” for links that are clearly not relevant and clearly ads. It isn’t automated though so not all sites are affected. Still, it is quite well documented and discussed. Many people including myself dropped Text Link Ads because of this. Bottom line is that it is subjective right now, google is making changes and many sites, newspapers, etc. have been hit.
For more info on the text link sales part of googles adjustment I have this blog entry. http://www.usef...s-text-link-ads
Eek! Nice title, Riley
Hot on the heels of that weird China stuff last week:
http://www.tech...torrent-i-want/
Appreciate you’re all the way in Australia, but still…
“…now i look and loath.”
Good.
I want to underscore that many companies, not just us, can do better than Google. Google is a 10 year old idea:
http://infolab....rub/google.html
That’s run it’s course. They should have done this 5 years ago or more. The fact that they are waiting is the same reason that made Microsoft make Vista horrible. Google is now caught in the vicious loop of “backwards compatibility” and fears of client dissatisfaction. This is a far cry from the .edu project that it started out as. They now have people from MS all over their buildings and their going to go down the same path.
That was my point. I only used my own engine as an example because that happens to be what I work on every day. Not to promote. And you know every word I wrote above is 100% true.
Hey,
This is causing big problems in the blogosphere.
A few general comments here – http://forums.d...ad.php?t=526531
Meanwhile, at PayPerPost, all hell is coming loose!
http://boards.p...780&start=0
I just did a post on this(http://www.bloggingindia.net/2007/10/24/google-starts-fighting-with-fire-pages-across-the-web-lose-pr/). I just have one question. How come Google penalized the bloggers who showed the links, and not the sponsors themselves?
Declares “jihad?” I don’t *really* care that much about word choice, but what’s wrong with a simple “declares war” ?
I feel for the guys whose blogs have been affected. But I feel that as Google wage their Jihad against Blog link farms, they should equally have rewarded obedient blogs.i.e. those blogs which do not have link farms.
Terrible headline.
Those of you crying over the use of the word “jihad” here really need to understand that it is not a muslim-only word. From Merriam-Webster:
2: a crusade for a principle or belief
There is obviously an ongoing crusade by Google based on their belief that links should never be of the paid variety. I can’t say I’m very surprised at the responses though, some people are just idiots.
I agree with the terrible headline comments.
Especially when YOU, Duncan, wrote a blog post specifically calling out “Jihad on You” for their poor taste:
http://www.tech...ign-poor-taste/
I’m sure it will come back to bite us all that we’re pointing the finger on you for this when we accidentally slip up on something ourselves in the future, but this reprimand is deserved.
anytime you have a bunch of people who follow a certain religion, they’re all dumb.
Yes, bad headline but due to the definition “jihad” is being used more and more all the time. Hopefully people do understand what it means.
And good on Google for taking care of this.
I can’t believe how badly weblogs inc was punished. Engadget a PR5??? What! That’s a top 1000 site. That’s ridiculous. Joystiq also got lowered to a 4. Holy cow.
PS: Lighten up everyone. Life’s too short to get stressed about PC nonsense.
Problogger and Copyblogger got hit real bad.
anyone know when sweden´s pageranks will be updated?
Man, everyone is writing about this. I am just about tired of hearing it in all of its fifty different versions.
The headline is pretty lame:)
I wonder how this affects companies like http://www.feeddigest.com
and also if it affects popurls.com
I think you need a second opinion in choosing your titles Duncan
I think it’s a good title, apt description although I can understand where it would be upsetting for people who cared more than I do.
How do you get those numbers? To a novice it seems like PR 5 would trump PR 7. Since you want to go up in rank.
Here’s a great tool for inspecting PageRank for websites across hundreds of Google datacenters.
http://www.wirank.com/en/
How about another title? Pogram? Holocaust? Final Solution?
Please don’t diminish the threat by applying the name of the banner under which people want to kill you and I by applying it to your personal pet peeve. Remember, they’d happily kill you and your family in the name of ‘Jihad’. Little more serious than a Google PageRank update, don’t you think?
I’m not surprised in the least that weblogs was “punished” – their entire sidebar and footer are filled with link spam for other sites in the network. I haven’t bothered counting but I’d guess at 150+ outgoing links just in the non-blog-post areas of the site (looking at engadget as an example).
However, it does highlight a flawed system when engadget is pr5 and joystiq is pr4 … that’s just insane.
It seems that waht Google really did is dial down the importance of intra-site or related site links. If sites are too closely related, or even on the same domain, they previously got all kinds of PageRank love because of that. Now, less so. It makes sense as some sites were using certain highly ranked sites to boost the rest of their network by having thousands of backlinks.
thanks for the explaination, Duncan….and here’s something I’ve found…
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of research on blogs for a variety of projects, and I’ve been dismayed by the number of blog networks that have sprung up in the past 6-9 months that link only to other blogs in their networks (including one blogger who writes the weblogs page for About.com telling everyone where they could find “great” blogs–all from b5 media, oddly…)
and let’s not forget about the “Posties”–many of whom occupy the mommyblogger sphere– and have created their own A-list…
If the smaller blog networks would have encouraged their bloggers to be part of the blogosphere and link to others–rather than doing what loads of newspaper blogs do and just link internally or not at all–maybe they’d have made more friends (read: links from other bloggers.) It certainly would have made their content more valuable to non-network bloggers.
Then again, maybe it’s not about creating community, nor about good content nor about influence nor about conversation–maybe it’s all been about creating “user-generated” content for lurkers and clickthrus that then drives advertising. no wonder so much of it’s kinda dull…
I had one site go from a 4 to a 2! And it was set to go up to a 6 under the old system too.
Thing is, I don’t do any linkfarming or anything like that. I had 3 or 4 TLA ads on there and that’s it.
My other blog, which also runs TLA, stayed a 4. Also, I have an ecommerce site that stayed at 4.
I m pretty new in blogging, dont really understand what is PR… Thanks, at least I had learn something new.
Cheers…
This change has really only started. People are reporting that traffic is unchanged, and revenues from AdSense are unchanged – in the first few hours.
However, Google takes time to propagate changes throughout it’s hundreds of datacenters and oodles of servers. Soon the domino effect of the reduced PageRank will bite into search results, and start to impact quality scores for AdSense and AdWords.
This will take more than a week to fully realize. For those that depend on traffic from Google’s search, expect blood to come shooting out their eyes as they watch thier traffic and revenues shrink.
Headline: Google Declare Ebola on Blog Link Farms!
Duncan,
Our site, a legitimate news site with a load of original content, dropped from a PR8 to a PR5. We have been selling text ads, monetizing as much as we can, since we are a non-profit organization looking to make ends meet. I am absolutely convinced that you are right about the correlation between the drop in Page Rank and the selling of text ads.
Harry
My site have a pagerank of 4 without any link farm or marketing. The site has has no visitor in a long time. I wonder how I get PR 4 in the first place.
http://www.web2newswire.com.
To those who say that PageRank doesn’t matter, I say NUTS!
It’s not just relevant, from this change today Google has declared that they want it to be even more relevant. They trimmed out those who specifically abuse it – why would Google do that if it doesn’t matter to them internally.
Some say proof that it doesn’t matter is that it doesn’t change often. Quite the opposite. It doesn’t change often because it does matter so much, and the gnashing of teeth that occurs when it does change is why Google treats it lightly, making thoughtful and considered updates.
Google’s PageRank is shown as a scale of 0 to 10, but underneath are up to five decimal points, and the scale is logarithmic, meaning it’s much harder to go from 5 to 6 that from 4 to 5. While you are a 5, you might move in range over a period of a year from 5.42535 to 5.63267 and such. You don’t see these moves, but they matter to Google. Big time. They affect the AdWords Quality Score, the AdSense payout values, and most certainly the placement in search results.
Headline: Google Declares Battle of the Bulge on Blog Link Farms!
Disclaimer:
My own site – on which I have steadfastly refused to sell links, retained it’s PR5, while my two largest competitors decreased, one from PR7 to PR5, and another from PR8 to PR6.
I expect great riches from this leveling of the playing field. Finally, I expect to reap the rewards of following the straight and narrow.
Headline: Google Declares Pot of Gold for Those Who Followed Google’s Guidelines!
A good list of blogs with lower PR can be found here.
http://www.prob...ger-pagerank-4/