Thanks for the Slap Google

by Scott Jangro on 10 March 2008

A few days ago my own pagerank here on the jangro.com homepage dropped from 6 to 4. I was always a little dubious over my ranking of 6, so it must have been a very weak 6. Therefore, a 2 point drop isn’t that surprising. In comparison, Jeremy mentioned recently that Shoemoney.com just dropped from 6 to 5. At least I’m in good company.

I’m not really sure what could have happened here, inbound links are steady, if not up, I don’t sell posts, or even sponsorships (yet). I do have a few posts around here with some affiliate links in them, but that’s not the norm. And arguably, those are my most useful posts judging by traffic and comments.

Maybe it’s just a glitch.

Not to be all sour grapes and all, but I’m thinking this may at least partly be a good thing. My PR6 do-follow blog status has landed me pretty squarely at the top of the “Comment Monkey Todo List”. I’d love to fall off their radar. Are you guys reading? Nothing to see here, move along now.

That lining’s of course silver as long as my Google traffic doesn’t drop. It doesn’t seem to have been affected so far. It is a bit annoying to get slapped for nothing from a pure ego standpoint.

Elsewhere, there are lots of grumbling around about some recent Google activity. SERPS changes, PR changes, quality score changes. More weeding out what they consider bad user experiences.

How about you, do you see writing on the wall? Does Google and the traffic sources have their sights more and more on Affiliates and other online marketers?

And how about you and your websites?

Are you spending time looking over your shoulder, dodging bullets, and waiting for the next round?

Or what are you doing to just get completely out of the line of fire?

  • As mentioned previously, I would not worry too much about PR. What you should be concerned about, however, is the amount of traffic your blog is getting.

    Keep up the blogs - they're very interesting.
  • Scott
    Dammit Pat, that's why I posted that on Revenews.

    Can't pull one over on the omniscient Google.

    (throwing a big word your way to help purge Kerfuffle. oops, there it is again back to the top. sorry dude.)
  • Scott
    Perhaps, Ben.

    I would hope that Google's not mistaking blog comment names (spammy ones at that) as paid links.

    Maybe I should be selectively no-following the people with the spammy comment names to just plain discourage that (stupid, IMO) behavior.
  • In reference to Micro Zune, maybe it does have something to do with Scott's outgoing link strategy. Could your do-follow links be having a negative effect on your overall site (PR only)? I doubt it...but some of Scott's member's names do look very text link buy-ish.
  • I think the time has come for us to admit (and spread the word) that visible pagerank is a joke. I don't know why Google makes it public, unless they think it can sell advertisers on AdWords. Who knows, they may decided to decrease pagerank because you don't serve AdSense. They can do whatever they want. There's no reason we should treat it like a serious metric.
  • Scott
    True Trust, I'm not worried.
    It is a telltale and a metric among many.

    It's our little glimpse into what google's thinking and interesting for that reason.
  • Jonathan (Trust)
    Page Rank? Just some green in a bar. Had one site that dropped Page Rank but traffic increased. If your traffic is still good, wouldn't worry about it.
  • One of my blogs dropped from a PR4 to a 0 last week. I removed my Text-Link-Ads and resubmitted the site for "reconsideration." Did you add the 'privacy policy' Google is requiring now?
blog comments powered by Disqus