Google Page Rank Slap

[Matthew Sherborne]

Looks like Google is going through some major adjustments with their page rank algorithms. They say this is to weed out paid links and devalue sites that participate in promoting them. This is resulting in many of the top bloggers getting a Google page rank slap.

Authority bloggers who have been in the business for years are being penalized for what Google calls misuse of their 'quality guidelines.' Earlier this years Matt Cutts of Google even went so far as to ask people to report paid links by filling out a spam report. What this means is Google is actively searching for sites engaged in the buying and selling of links and plan to devalue the relevance of paid links accordingly.

There is some speculation as to why it is in Google's best interest to eliminate paid links. For one by eliminating the ability for blogs to sell paid links, it will make many people opt to put Google Adsense ads on their sites as a way to monetize their sites. This will mean increased revenue for Google and their Adwords sponsored advertising program.

Google maintains this practice of devaluing paid links is necessary to maintain unbiased search results. However, there's little argument that large corporations who have millions of dollars to spend on purchasing authority sites will go unaffected. These corporations are frequently purchasing high PageRank sites then linking them to their other websites, which in turn artificially inflates their other sites PageRank status. Will these corporations linking strategies go unaffected, very likely they will. Is this fair?

As a result of the latest 2007 quarter three page rank update has not shown any positive results only a decline in page rank for many sites world wide. Here's just a few of those impacted by the recent page rank algorithm change:

Entrepreneurs Journey Went from a page rank 6 to page rank of 5
http://www.johnchow.com/when-should-you-put-ads-on-your-blog/ Went from a page rank of 6 to a page rank of 5
AndyBeard.eu - Went from a page rank of 5 to a page rank of 4.

Will there be an update for sites like the Paid Insider who have over a thousand incoming links and no page rank to date? Let's hope so...

Update October 2007---> The recent Page Rank has struck and the Google Gods smile upon us!