Yesterday, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed in an interview with Search Engine Journal that the recent PageRank downgrades were intended to tackle sites selling links.
The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.
Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.
2 Comments
Anyway, it doesn’t affect traffic. One of my sites was affected by the latest PR update and it lost 1 point. However, I am not selling any links there. Even a friend of mine has a site which lost 1 PR point, but he’s not selling links at all :) .
Google is making mistakes. A lot of mistakes…
Jan, there were two Toolbar PR updates that tookplace over a few weeks. The first one redueced the PageRank of sites selling links by two or mroe points. This may have been just to stop link sellers using their Toolbar PR as a marketing tool. But, I’m not convinced that Google would be firing blanks.
Most likely what you’ve experienced is the second update which is a regular rescaling. PR never goes above ten, and as the big sites increase their relative PR your site gets a little downgraded