Search Engine Marketing Spot

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed. Thank you for visiting SEMSPot!

Today we were witness to a major shift made by Google and there PR. As you have now probably read, several high profile websites have had there PR reduced drastically overnight without any warning. I first read about it this morning on Andy Beard’s site where he has a small list of compiled sites and there effected PR numbers. It has been all over Sphinn today as well, with everyone trying to decipher why the sudden change by Google. Jill Whalen wrote a nice article over at High Rankings that makes for a good read. However I do not feel that this sudden change is just over paid links, I also feel it deals with inter linking with other sites. I believe these changes were also made manually. There is no new algorithm out that has made these changes. If that was the case, then why didn’t everyone else’s websites see a drop in there PR? It isn’t the case, so we can put a nail in the coffin on the idea that it is a network wide change by Google and all sites are now on a new PR system.

So I am sure we can all agree that this deals with sites selling links that do not use the nofollow tag. There are the obvious sites that have there sponsored links section somewhere on the front page. What about sites that say they have never sold a link, but were still penalized? I believe they fall into the realm of inter linking with other sites, or what I will just call the Google Fog List. GFL for short, which we could also interpret as “Good F’ing Luck” getting your PR back. You can get on there fog list by simply linking to other sites that have been hit with a penalty for selling links. If your site links enough times to them then that would cause Google to start looking at you.

Right now Google is on the top of the world looking down through the fog clouds at everyone else like a puppet master. Well when they start looking at how many times you have linked to these other sites that sell links, they bend down into the fog and start penalizing you as well. Almost like a link farm system where sites are all connected somehow with a lot of links. Popular blogs like SERoundtable, Problogger, Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Journal, Any Beard, and Copyblogger have all seen there PR drop. Some of these sites obviously sell links, and others do not. However the sites that do not sell links might have enough links pointing back to another site that was penalized, thus they to are now being flagged by Google. It goes back to watching who you link to, if you link to bad sites then you are running the risk of being penalized yourself. Also a lot of these sites penalized sell quit a few ad spaces, some even for text-link-ads so does that play a role in the mix? It could be part of it, in order to demand higher dollar for your advertising space the higher the PR the more people will pay for that ad space. I do not work for Google so I can say these are the definite reasons, just my opinions.

I personally feel that right now this change is just in PR alone. So far none of the sites have mentioned a drop in there SERP’s or there traffic. It is a warning shot from Google, either clean up your act up, or the next time we will drop you in the SERP’s. I could be wrong, maybe this is just phase 1 and in the coming days phase 2 kicks in and we start to see these sites drop all of a sudden. So I would love to have some type of answer from Matt Cutts in regards to this pretty big shuffle today, question is, we he make one? As Jill said, let’s get the popcorn and get ready to watch the show. I personally can care less about the green bar and what it has labeled for PR. I will continue to optimize my clients sites for the results they are looking for, last I checked increasing there PR was not on the to do list.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.