Google Penalizing Blog Sites

First it was google penalizing some big name directories that sells paid text link ads without the “nofollow” tag or redirects (passing PR). Their site names are not even shown on the results. Now Google might be penalizing blog sites that sells text link ads or engage in exchanging network linking that passes PR.

You can view a list of big name sites such as Engadget to Washington Post on the DailyBlogTips http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-changing-the-pagerank-algorithm/ and Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/10/pagerank-update.html that have been hit with a lower PageRank. Wow, even Forbes.com!

Matt Cutt from Google has been saying over and over that paid text link ads that passes PR is against googles’s policy. They do have all the power to do what they want to since they are in control of the whole Goodle PR. The only thing users can do is not use Google. But really…can you not use Google? I use Google for search, email, calendar, weather, analytics, and 411. I mean Google does offer a lot of free things, so is it so bad for google to ask people not to have paid text link ads on their site that passes PR? I guess it depends on who you ask. If your site is making an income solely on provide Google Juice, then you’ll probably hate what Google is doing. If your site is high traffic and really doesn’t matter if you have PR or not, then it wouldn’t matter to you that much.

Does PageRank really matter that much? I guess it depends on what you are trying to do. For companies with sites that can’t really be SEOed, it’s easier to buy text link because it does help those keyword show up higher in Search Engines. Though for sites - especially design sites that are heavy with Flash or design sites that just want to keep it clean without a keyword sprinkles, it is usually done through other forms of marketing and the point is to have the site be seen by people, not just by spiders (though spiders do a pretty good job designing their web - yeah, that was dorkist).

I’m guessing that currently google is penalizing sites manually, but maybe they could be “testing” their new algo (though there are still PR7 sites selling text links…so maybe not). The problem is how will they be sure some links are paid for. Who knows…but seriously, Google is starting to piss a lot of people off who use to be fans. I don’t know how they can stop using Google though…

Anyhow, you can read Matt Cutts blog about backlinks http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/tell-me-about-your-backlinks/ from Dec 2005. It mentioned two sites buying links from ketv.com. The odd thing is the ketv site has been a PR6 and until recently, I guess it’s going down to a PR4 - why wasn’t the site penalized even back then if Matt Cutts knew about it? If you want to know more about what you can or might be able to do and not do, then read his paid links post from him.

PR is useful in some ways, but I don’t think it’s everything in getting good organic traffic.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Search Engine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.