Many sites have seen a big drop in PageRank. Some even from 9 to 6. Hours later, many others have reported on this.
Websites affected by Google’s October PageRank update:
AndyBeard PR5 to PR3
AutoBlog PR6 to PR4
Blog Herald PR6 to PR4
CopyBlogger PR6 to PR4
Engadget PR7 to PR5
Forbes.com PR7 to PR5
JoyStiq PR6 to PR4
Master New Media PR7 to PR4
ProBlogger.net PR6 to PR4
SFGate PR7 to PR5
StatCounter PR10 to PR6
SunTimes PR7 to PR5
Tuaw PR6 to PR4
WashingtonPost.com PR7 to PR5]
Most of the sites mentioned above have a lot of interlinking going on between them.
Philipp Lenssen says that, “Interestingly enough, the last time I checked, Google’s own AdWords still allowed text link brokers to advertise their systems not sure if that’s still the case.”
Come to think of it, Google Webmaster Help Center’s guidelines lays down the rules straight and clear:-
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”
Duncan Riley, feels that “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)
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October 29th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I’m happy with this update since my site stepped from pagerank 3 to pagerank 4!
A strange update anyway… we’ve waited for 6 months and now a lot of sites have lost 1-2 or eve 3 pr points!
November 7th, 2007 at 7:02 am
Personally, I think PR is kind of over-rated. I feel it was kind of hyped and slowly lost its appeal. I think how well you rank in a search engine for a keyword is a better way to rank sites. Just my opinion….