PR goes down 2nd time in a month - many sites affected

[dataguy]

This morning I see that the home page of my site has gone down to PR3. It had gone down to PR4 (from PR5) a few weeks ago when everyone was talking about Google doing a manual adjustment of sites thought to be selling links.

I could care less about the little green bar, traffic is at an all time high for this site. We have never bought or sold links for this site or any other site we own. I don't care if the site goes PR0 as long as Google doesn't stop sending us visitors.

Any idea what is going on?

[potentialgeek]

Proposed:

Google Sets PR of Every Site to 0.

PR Link Farms Crash and Burn.

Matt Cutts proceeds to next Spam Target.

p/g

[Stefan]

May be some drop in the TBPR is due to some wikipedia no follow tags. If TBPR updates about once every 4 months, the the wiki no follow fallout of little green pixels might be a reason why people are dropping.

I don't know about that. My main site has about 6-8 wiki links and didn't suffer a PR loss. The index is still at PR5 (the same as the washington post ;-), and the main subpages are still PR4. But we have no paid links, and the outbounds are all very pertinent. Not that many overall - about ten outbounds to other domains on over 500 text-heavy pages.

[edited by: tedster at 12:34 am (utc) on Oct. 27, 2007]

[OutdoorMan]

Has anyone gotten a bump in PR or is it only down?

I have two sites: #1 has increased it's HP PR from PR2 to PR3. #2 has increased it's HP PR from PR0 to PR2.

Several inner pages has also gone up in PR.

[edited by: OutdoorMan at 1:04 am (utc) on Oct. 27, 2007]

[extremegolfer]

Since pagerank bears the name of Alan Page of Google, they will never drop it. However, putting the giant ego aside, pagerank is not worth 2 cents. It is the webmaster community that cares about pagerank. Actual rankings are no longer dependent on pagerank. In fact, they have not been dependent on pagerank for quite some time...

IMHO they should complete shut off pagerank.

[extremegolfer]

Sell all the links you want guys, don't worry about PR. Yahoo.com was a PR10, it now is a PR9, was Yahoo selling links too? How about Brett from this forum. Is he selling links too, because he has gone down from a PR8 to a PR7. Check the future pagerank... Don't believe the hype machine of Google. Every time during Christmas season, they mess with the rankings. Don't worry, sell links and keep taking customers away from Adwords. That is what all this is about.

[potentialgeek]

from eWeek:

Google's Reputation System Roils Web World

The blogosphere erupts with the cries of indignant Web site proprietors who see their PageRank ratings tumble. . . Google hasn't admitted to tweaking PR (PageRank). . . Search Engine Land, one of many search-oriented sites to notice the move, pointed out the PR drops on Oct. 24, noting that Forbes.com, WashintonPost.com, SFGate.com, SunTimes.com and Engadget.com all dropped from PR7 to PR5."

[eweek.com...]

Obviously the reporters at these "top" papers need to improve their writing! :/

p/g

[edited by: tedster at 7:18 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[Frederic1]

Hi everybody, I was also hit by the PR Penalty.

Not only my site dropped from PR5 to PR3 yesterday but today it was also filtered from Google :'( The traffic dropped by 75% (!)

I don't understand because I have *Never Ever* sold links on my website, I swear.

I sent a message on Matt Cutts Blog on the topic "International bugs" (I'm French). I have also filled a reinclusion request through Google Webmaster Central. I hope this will help :(

Has anyone ever gotten a reply from Google Webmaster Central?

[tedster]

Frederic, the PR drop for selling links was rolled out a few days before the more general PR update. If your PR was stable up until yesterday, most likely the drop was not because of the "PR penalty".

[Frederic1]

Thanks for your reply Tedster, and more generally for all the help you provide on this forum.

Just to correct a little mistake : my site dropped from pr6 to pr3 and not from pr5 to pr3 (sorry for the mistake). I am 99% sure that this is a penalty because the number of sites that link to mine have not dropped since the last PR update.

But once again, what disturbs me most is the loss of traffic. It's a site that I was working on day and night, sometimes spending sleepless nights and yesterday Google filtered it. I am still getting traffic from bookmarks, but nothing compared to what Google was sending me. Even when I type my site's name on Google, I am on the 5th page :(

[Halfdeck]

"While PR score is one factor that determines if a page will rank well in a search, it is also a factor in how much the Mountain View, Calif., company can charge its AdSense network affiliates"

Absolute nonsense.

"PageRank ... is Google's system for weighing a Web page for its relevance to a specific query based on the number of links that it has to it."

PageRank doesn't weigh relevance and isn't just about link counts.

BTW, some sites are regaining their TBPR. And Darren Rose seems to have received confirmation from inside Google that the recent TBPR drops were "all" about paid links.

[edited by: Halfdeck at 1:13 am (utc) on Oct. 28, 2007]

[europeforvisitors]

Utter garbage Google red herring propaganda. Explain the PR3 ranking of www.youtube.com, did they sell links too?

Why assume that everything works perfectly, and that there's no such thing as "collateral damage"?

For that matter, why assume that every drop in PR is the result of a penalty? Several things can be going on at once. (Example: Within the same domain, a couple of my index pages have dropped a point while others have gained a point. Why? Almost certainly because of changes in internal linking on the site, and because of a toolbar update that just happened to coincide with whatever Google may have been doing to link-selling or link-buying sites. Contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, coincidences can and do happen.)

[Miamacs]

That eWeek article is so UTTER nonsense!
Gosh!

Who the... h3ll let that article pass?
The writer has no idea what he's talking about... none whatsoever.

PageRank being used in calculations on how much AdSense charges anyone? HUH?... I'm sure they meant AdWords, but that'd be an even bigger HUUUH?

No, it's the people who were selling links off their websites who will now be able to charge less for their Google-manipulating links on the 'b(l)ack market'. This guy must have come over from another division just to write the article.

...

And PageRank being relevance?
Ouch, just sit down and think for a moment!
How could a number mean everything and anything that people search for... and ... uh... ew.

...

I mean... Wow.
I'm used to reading nonsense on news sites and magazines but this came in 2nd this month. Congratulations to eWeek. I see their PageRank is 5 as well. *bwahahaa*

Btw their pages can't load properly because of the umphteen terrabytes of advertisements.

[digitalv]

Prior to the first update my site was an 8. After the update it was a 7. I did have paid ads on the site, some were text based, but were there because of the site's six-figure-per-month traffic, not for PR (admittedly I'm sure at least one buyer bought ads for PR purposes, but that's not what I was selling).

Anyway after the first update I updated all of the ads with the "nofollow" tag because I don't want to be flagged as a link seller.

Today the toolbar PR is a 4. However I'm still #1 in the Google results for my main keywords and my site is still spidered daily.

So I guess the question is was the 2nd update using data that was gathered BEFORE the first update or AFTER?

Logically I would think that adding the nofollow tag would "fix" any possibility of being flagged as a link seller, so with any luck the penalty wouldn't stick. However if they're building the PR from the "older" data, before I made those changes, then they would still think I was selling PR.

Does that make any sense?

Oh, and I don't know who thinks Youtube is a PR3, it's an 8 to me...

[tedster]

Yep, YouTube is back to PR8 for me too, but I can verify that it was a PR3 for a while.

[matrix_neo]

According to me this PR update is not all about selling links, it has got something more to it, since many sites that are selling links not affected and many other affected without selling links.

[tedster]

Keeping the waters quite muddy, Google has tweaked PR twice in October and then rolled out a third change - a more global "PR Update". So it's no longer clear that this thread began after the second tweak and before the PR update.

Because of this unclear situation, let's take all further discussion to this one thread:

Google Page Rank Updated [webmasterworld.com]