The much anticipated Google PR update had come and gone. While most were hoping for some upward movement in their page ranks, most ended up in a trail of disappointment. The page rank for many sites had gone down. Forget about new sites. Most still spot the N/A comment. Well, in all honesty, N/A does look better than a fat 0. Provided of course you do a search on your site name and it comes out in the Google search result. The very least, you know your site is indexed and not just ignored by the crawlers. N/A simply meant there’s no available ranking designated to the site for the time being. Not really something to warrant sleepless nights.
There are of course plenty of speculations regarding the PR drop to most sites. Paid posts being one. Seeing some of the sites that lost their PR are not doing sponsored posts, I think this accusation does not completely hold water. Another popular notion is, bad links/bad neighbourhood.
Google had been known to clamp down on bad links (links that Google considers not in their good books. Might be dubious Spam sites and all). Sometimes, site are merely penalized on the basis of ‘bad association.’ When certain good sites are penalized, resulting in PR drop, that creates a domino effect on its other links. It’s been open knowledge one way to get your site PR up is to get links from higher PR site. In the event the ‘higher PR site’ suffers a drop in their own PR, inevitably it will affect the other sites.
I don’t want to lose sleep over what those folks in Google are doing. It’s fun reading the theories, but, personally I won’t think too much. Especially on things that is not within my control. Dang, life is too short to be worrying about how other people (Google) are conducting their business. Something worthy of consideration is PR rankings are in no way a reflection of actual traffic. For sites that thrive on a good base of loyal readers, PR ranking is not everything.
For peace of mind, web owners and bloggers can just play their role in this whole thing. What role? Make a concerted effort to ensure your site is not linking to any site that is in the bad books with Google. There are sites checking the veracity of the links you intend to put up. Now, I’ve just started this practice and I’m not sure how effective it’s going to be. But then the very least, I can be restassured I’ve done my part in this whole PR fiasco.
What will be, will be.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Bloggings. 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.
Huh? The Google update is done? I thought it would take a few weeks, considering the amount of blogs there are?
Google PR, Technorati Ranking, Alexa traffic etc are just but topics for conversation. There is nothing concrete or credible about all these stats because of the variabilities involved.
Is it? Came and gone? Didn’t realise cos I think mine is still N/A…LOL…Quite depressing really cos I am trying very hard to up my blog one notch..to 0…kekeke…
pablo may be right, but no matter how in accurate they may be, most companies still depends on these stats to determine their offers.
For example, now I cannot bid for the higher priced paid post that are reserved for PR4 and above, so it kind of hurts.
Of course if I am one who don’t do paid post, they can give me a big fat zero fo all I care. Since it is now quite clear that doing paid post is not the reason that blogs gets punished with demotion, I think I will do more for AhPek.com.
BTW, you sure have a humongous mouse!
Bummer, I didn’t realise it was over. I used to have PR4, now I have PR0. It’s a bit of a blow, but I’m trying hard not to care because I still come up in Google searches and get traffic from there.
Arguably the most valuable traffic is from direct recommendations and comments on other blogs - they’re more likely to cause repeat traffic anyway. Searches are good when you write something unique, but if it’s that unique it will come up early in the searches no matter your PR.
If it’s not penalised for doing paid post, I just hope it is really not the case. This demotion in Page Rank has really afflicted most blog sites.
Seems like the PR is really something though not as important for topic searches but it really helps in doing paid posting. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see for the next so called update then