Page Rank Crisis

There is a crisis of Google Page Rank out among the masses.  It seems Google changed its formula and some people descended unhappily.

One theory involves text link ads.  Certainly link farms have always been a problem, getting people sandboxed completely for allowing subdomains under their domain to be used for massive link farms.  But within reason, some paid links on main pages shouldn’t be a big deal.  Though they apparently had also gone after link counts in general, devaluing you for too many, shades of when NZ Bear’s Ecosystem had to do the same to fight manipulation of blog ranks, mainly through open inline trackback parties.

The thing is, some affected blogs or sites wouldn’t seem to qualify for such a reduction based on paid links.

A better theory is that the new formula takes on blog groups that cross-link each other to build rank, as well as drive traffic.  That would explain why the one affiliate blog I checked had dropped from PR of 6 to a still respectable 5.

Ours didn’t drop, unless it had gone up while I wasn’t looking.  I’m pretty sure we never reached 6, so being 5 now means we’re unchanged.  It’s the same at AV, here, and bizosphere.com, the home of CotC.  Elhide.com and my original blog are both 4, and everything else is lower, also not a change, to my awareness.

It is kind of interesting, reliance on an artificial rank that lives or dies by the decisions of the company behind it, and can make you more or less money, depending.  At the same time, it’s interesting that they setup the game a certain way, creating a system that encourages certain behavior, and then get unhappy with the results.

I sympathize, but I also find the actions and reactions all around to be a fascinating study in business and human behavior.

Posted by on 10/25 at 01:35 PM

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