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From my observations, I have not seen the usual PR updates that usually occur. Only Pr's going from PR5, PR6, and PR7's to Zero's. Some coming back and some staying there.
Mind that I am tracking domains that I work with, as well as very popular domains.
I have a domain that had over 11,000 backlinks and a PR8, and the links have dropped to under 1,000 and the PR still remains an 8. It was previously a PR6 before that backlink campaign.
So this leads me to think that something drastic is going to happen and when it hits, it will hit hard on many different sites.
There are already many out there with PR0's and no real answer to why. Usually when you got a PR0, you knew why and it was usually related to spammy, cloaky reasoning. This time around, the question is BIG, and people aren't sure.
Some are relating it to too many backlinks from specific directories saying they may now be categorized as link farms, and then others are simply lost.
I would be interested to hear other people's theory on what is up with the Google PR and what you think may happen in the very near future.
With minimal PR updates for about 3 full months, and many backlink updates, something is bound to happen soon.
Let me know your thoughts
Thanks
KG
Another site dropped on about September 7. It might be because a couple of sites joined the competition. Traffic from Google is about 30% of what it was in August. With this site I went to second page of SERP instead of oblivion. Used to get traffic from general keyword searches, now they need to be pretty obscure. Changed some outgoing links hoping it would make a difference (hasn't yet).
Hopefully whenever it comes the "Vegas" update will have him chatting up a storm... :)
Has about 3 incoming links.
A year old and only 3 incoming links? I think you've identified your own problem.
quite interesting, why GoogleGuy is keeping silence?
In essence, there is no more GoogleGuy and hasn't been for some time, (IPO and all of that). He was ordered to shut-up.
For ONCE, I believe you're wrong steveb--perhaps an occasional, obligatory, drive-by. He'll be missed.
I tend to agree with the reason suggested that it is to stop the artificial link trading which has been going on. If you speak to anyone who uses the internet as a USER looking for stuff, in my experience most use Google but have not downlaoded the tool bar and if they do pay no attention to the green bar. So the green PR bar seems (I have no evidence to support this though, just my observations) to be used by people who run websites. So perhaps its original purpose is redundant ie giving some measure of a sites credibility, its now used purely by webmasters for link building?
I actually feel more inclined to purchase links on high traffic sites now, than when Google was updating more often. In many cases the ROI on purchased links exceeds the cost of Adwords. I get traffic from THE LINKS. I'm not too worried about Google when considering buying links. I have had some great success, and will be increasing the purchase of links on relevant sites where people would be interested in my sites, and decreasing the budget on Adwords. When Google starts updating again, and I am rewarded for adding quality content to the web, I will likely back off on buying links, and might even consider increasing my adsense budget on niche areas where I am having trouble competing.
Has anyone seen examples of the google ip addresses hitting there site without google in the useragent?
I have recoded my botwatcher to look specifically for any of the ip address ranges that google has registered/listed in the ARIN database. I think this may help to also explain the different types of google bots and their activities in comparison to each other.
Whats up with that?
I think they are going to do away with as much as possible to try and curb the activity by the SEO and such to drive more business to the addsense..
Just my thoughts...
If we are going to learn anything useful from this, however, it seems to me that we should try to find common factors that existed among the affected sites. If this is a filter or penalty, we should try to identify what it is related to. We can then get out of it, or at least avoid repeating the same mistake in the future.
I'm interested in knowing what notable SEO-related characteristics the affected sites had at the time they dropped (high keyword density, heavy internal linking, heavy cross-linking, money terms, AdSense publisher, AdWords advertiser, reciprocal linking, paid links?). If people sticky me the pertinent info about their sites, I'll confidentially compare the results and report anything of interest.
Let’s shoo away the looky-loos and start investigating this accident. ;)
I think they are going to do away with as much as possible to try and curb the activity by the SEO and such to drive more business to the addsense..
I don't know that I would agree with this statement. First and formost there are different manners of SEO'ing a site - namely those that are benificial from a user perspective, and those that are derogitory (or neutral) from a user perspective. Very few ever *legitimatly* claim to have optimized a site in the former manner and had it penalized for extended periods of time.
This forum is rather anonymous by nature and I dont often see that sites that get hit here, but I am guessing most often they incorperate (perhaps to a limited extent, perhaps extensivly) the neutral/derogitory type optimizations.
Given that commercial widgets are searched for and 10 sites have to be returned by the serps, you are going to see SEO'ed sites in there, in some cases optimization itself might be considered the mark of more mature and suitable sites, as SEO can (but does not necessarily) represent a last effort after maturity has been acceived. If I were in googles shoes I would focus on ensuring that the one or five or ten SEO'ed sites in a given serp are the sites which have added value for users in their efforts to manipulate.
While adwords may play a part in the effort, google became a name in part because it kept paid advertising minimal and unintrusive, if their serps were to become devoid of value and paid results were the only viable results from a users perspective then this would no longer be the case. Consequently, much of a users attraction to google would be lost.
<edit>spelling</edit>
I heard that, but then check top money sites out and check backlinks -;)
but at another side, this theory doesn't explaines why established sites were removed from serps. also, i can't understand how can G calcluate growth speed, if not all pages are updated everyday (i mean the update regularity difference between High- and Low-PR sites).
G seems to simply filter new sites simply because they are new - I see it with standard non commercial sites, no spurious linking etc, once they would have been ranked roughly were they deserved to be, now they are artificially pushed back for 3 months (and counting)
G seems to simply filter new sites simply because they are new
false. i've saw few new sites for rather popular keywords. also, someonó from this board reported that he expirience no problems with new sites.
Noonó has proved it to me yet.
:)
All of them are 2 to 3 years old.
4 months ago, I hired a team to do 100 high quality theme link exchanges.
For the longest time, only the 2 oldest websites moved up in the serps for the targeted anchor text. The 3rd one just sat there. Now, the 3rd has move up signicantly as well.
The first two have dmoz and yahoo listings. (grandfathered yahoo, back when it was only $200/lifetime to get in).
I have two newer sites (appox. 1 year old) that underwent high quality, theme related link exchanges - but I didn't even get them into the top 500 with those campaigns. Maybe in 1 to 2 years, it will start to pay off. However, the pagerank and traffic did improve thanks to the link campaigns.
:)
For my money, this is the key. Whatever google is doing will probably be aimed at the same end result as always, ie. to provide relevant SERP's for it's users. If people are already finding your site through on topic links through related sites, you're golden.
Famous last words?
