Displayed PageRank Becoming Vaporware?

[dvduval]

I'm getting the impression PageRank as shown in the green bar is becoming vaporware. There are sites that clearly bought their pagerank and continue to sell links to the highest bidder. This has been going on since April. A proper pagerank update would have solved this problem.

For example, I am looking at hyperlink on clear.gif on a pagerank 8 charity site, and the site receiving the juice has a pagerank of 7 and they have been selling links for months.

Another example, is a Chinese news site that has about 50 links they sold to casinos, pharma and other sites AND those sites are clearly receiving pagerank juice with pageranks of 6,7, and 8.

Looking at another site that is pagerank 7 that I have been following since April, and they have links they purchased from a popular server software company, and a template site, etc. Right on their site, they are then selling links.

I am aware of 2 of these sites being reported, because people said they reported them in threads discussing them on another forum.

I don't know if google is just ignoring the problem or what. It is one thing not to update the green bar, but quite another to ignore abuse reports, and allow sites to rank higher by breaking the rules.

And yes, I did check the ranking of these sites for their key phrases. Despite the idea that pagerank is constantly updated, despite what the green bar shows, I am not seeing this as being the case. These sites are ranking great!

So I see a number of ways to think about this:
1. Breaking the rules really pays off, and google doesn't even care anyway, so go for it.
2. Google has a backlog of reports and isn't able to keep up . Additionally, google is not doing any checking for abuse on their own, as these cases were easy to find. I could give you a dozen more.
3. Google is turning the green bar into vaporware, but just hasn't announced it yet.
4. Even though google is allowing dishonest people to manipulate serps now despite reports, they have a super cool update planned.

I'm left scratching my head here. I don't understand at all why clear cheats who are even reported don't get slapped with a penalty. Has google given up trying?

I would be happy to help, so if you are reading this google, I live 10 minutes from you! :)

[tedster]

Well, it's not true vaporware because there's clearly a very thriving marketplace around the green pixels.

We know that Google has placed a "toolbar penalty" on sites for selling links and that they have done it in between regular Updates. I wonder if that practice has now stopped.

[setzer]

We know that Google has placed a "toolbar penalty" on sites for selling links and that they have done it in between regular Updates. I wonder if that practice has now stopped.

I'm not so sure. A site I run just dropped from a strong PR5 to PR3 last week. It *seems* like a penalty, but I'm not entirely sure what caused it. We've never engaged in any black hat practices or sold links.

We did buy out a rising competitor about 2 months ago and 301'd all links to our site. Coincidentally, their site had a PR3. Whether or not this had any bearing on our PR slump, I'm not sure. But it seems like the only factor that could have caused it.

Anyway, our standing in the SERPs remains unaffected. Still ranking in the top ten for plenty of high volume terms in our niche.

[tedster]

Right - not all drops in PR are the kind of toolbar penalty I waas talking about.

Google DID do a real PR update just last week. My own sense of the biggest change involved is a re-evaluation of various backlinks. Some backlinks are now weighted lower (or not at all) than they used to be. The change in weighting occurred many weeks bacj but the toolbar update is only now visible.

You're right to stay focused on whether PR changes make any REAL changes in rankings, or even more, any changes in traffic and how it converts. The toolbar number changes don't really matter - UNLESS you are selling links/ads. And that's the kind of situation where those apparent toolbar "penalties" come into play.

[goodroi]

in money making industries i rarely consider toolbar pagerank but in less polluted online industries i do sometimes consider the toolbar pagerank in my decision making process. it is one of many, many signals that i look at. the key is to remember that toolbar pagerank is not current or 100% accurate.

i love toolbar pagerank because it helps the competition waste time as they blindly chase after it and helps me in negotiations with those webmasters.

i personally still see some value to it. its just not nearly as valuable as it used to be.

[jdMorgan]

> It is one thing not to update the green bar, but quite another to ignore abuse reports, and allow sites to rank higher by breaking the rules.

TBPR has always been slow to update, and often reflects PR as it was several months ago.

Abuse reports are likely classified in three ways: First, there are reports of malicious Web sites. These reports likely take priority over all others.

Then there are reports that indicate algorithm or "filter" problems. Those go to the engineering and search quality groups for analysis and possible action.

Finally, there are "spammy and junk site" reports, to include those selling links or linking out to irrelevant sites. Those may be handled using a blacklist, filters, or per-site or per-URL "penalties."

But in any of these cases, it's important to remember the 'scale' of the Web and the number of people using Google. We're talking about billions of users and Web pages. Even if only a tiny fraction of those pages are bad, and if only a tiny number of Google users click the "Give us feedback" link below the search results, you can imagine the resulting back-log of work... likely hundreds of thousands of reports per month. So changes based on user-generated "spam" reports and human-review results cannot be expected to be prompt.

Search results may now be "instant," but crawling, indexing, ranking, and quality-related actions are certainly not.

Jim

[Planet13]

Some backlinks are now weighted lower (or not at all) than they used to be.

Tedster; could you elaborate on which particular types of back links seem to have been devalued the most?

[tedster]

I'm still researching specifics and probably will be for quite a while - it's a big project.

As a general rule, you could say backlinks that are not likely to be clicked get devalued - according to Google's "reasonable surfer" model.

My further suspicion? The best backlinks generate other signals around the web soon after they appear: social signals, traffic, further "viral" citations, etc. If a backlink doesn't show any of those ripple effects, then the link's effect "may be" dampened. And this dampening has its own ripple effect for sites that are linked to.

In other words, your backlinks, on their own, may be totally natural and editorially given. But the sites where those backlinks appear may have lost power because THEIR backlinks are unbalanced. This means that site's links send less juice to you.

Even a few links that are likely to generate real traffic for you will be better than links that are chased only for their PR value. PR is no longer calculated the way the original patent stated.