I recently talked to a sales rep at PayPerPost about their penalized bloggers, and he tried to assure me that "even though their toolbar (visible) PageRank has been penalized, their links still pass the same amount of PageRank that they ever did." At first, I was thinking, "yeah right." It would make sense for them to say that because they want to sell posts. Of course it would be in their best interest if that where the case. But then I thought about the fact that the sites who have been penalized for selling links, at least the ones I know of, have not lost their rankings. So if their rankings are still there, possibly PR is as well - even though the toolbar PR is penalized.
There are many more parameters than PR that effect traffic. If Google only changed the PR value for those sites and the other parameters are still supporting it in the SERPs then there should be little to no loss in traffic. The PPP people are just trying to sell their product saying what people want to hear. I would not bother worrying about PR or PPP for that matter. Cheers!
Simple explanation for their rankings still withstanding? PR is "one of ~230" methods for ranking a site in the SERPs.
Well PageRank is one of a lot more than 230 factors, but it certainly is one of the most important. If actual PageRank is penalized, it should have a noticeable negative affect on rankings. That being said, it still doesn't mean that any amount of PR is passed on to an outgoing link even if toolbar PR is penalized and rankings remain steady. Like Snowbird said, I highly doubt it as well.
Please spend some time Googling 'pagerank factors - matt cutts' Note the quotation marks around "one of ~230". Go figure!
From what I can make of my observations, they are still passing good juice, but yes one of many factors, so if a site had serps before, passed you serps through a link, then dropped in pr but kept its serps, I think your serps will still be good.
Page rank and Rankings are entirely two different things Page rank is a pages trust factor for the information that it is giving(in comparison and among other websites) Ranking is the traffic factor or its popularity among the visitors The two may look and sound similar, but google keeps them separate
It is always amusing to read the wild speculations about how PR is passed, what awful Google did recently with link sales and how to game them. The point is, they are smart. They do what is best for them. They think that paid links make their SERPs quality worse and they fight it (if that means more money from adwords all the better). As they said, if you sell links and you have a quality site, your site will still rank as before, but your links will not pass any PR. If you buy a link and google correctly guesses that it is a bought link, it will have no effect on your PR or rankings even if it is from a relevant PR10 page. If you buy a link from PayPerPost or another service that is big enough to be detected by google, odds are it will have no effect on your ranking. Read Matt Cutts blog and do not trust anyone but your own common sense.
If you honestly think that PageRank and rankings are completely separate, do a search for a competitive, short keyword phrase that returns a lot of results. You will not see any low PR sites showing up at the top of the SERP's. PageRank is a huge factor in rankings. It just gets more confusing now that we have websites whose "toolbar PageRank" has been penalized for link selling. A site can have high PR, but not show it on a toolbar. "Trust" or "TrustRank" is a different factor entirely that affects rankings. It's based on things like age of site, length of domain registration, TrustRank of other sites who link to your site, etc. There's a lot of misinformation out there, please don't add to it by posting stuff like this. It confuses people new to SEO.
I agree with you. I have seen blog posting services work for a lot of websites, but I think those days are numbered.
Here is my experience on PR Penalized Sites: I bought links from two PR6 site (very similar theme to my site, alexa ranking ~400k) a few months ago. One recently got penalized (becomes PR0) and the other wasn't effected (yet). Since I am using long tail kw as the anchor text and I am keeping track of the ranking on different search engine, I am able to tell how effective each of the link is. For text link I bought the penalized site, I ranked number 1 for the kw on Yahoo, Altavista and MSN but not Google. The interesting thing is, I am getting nowhere for that long tail kw. While for the link I bought form a non-penalized site, I am ranking 3-5 on various search engine including Google. Even though I don't have lots of data to show that penalized site won't pass PR juice (my experience is limited to just two links and one site), but it seems from my experience that there is "some" relationship between PR and SERP.
The other thing you have to ask yourself is that... G knows these sites have been bad, so why would you want to be on Google's radar? What if at some time in the near future G drops another bomb?
Do you think Matt Cutts would tell every secret of how Google bots work for SERPs? PR is definitely the central focus for ranking on Google, ( I am not talking about the visible PR on the foolish tool-bar) - Go to Google webmasters and re-read what they say there -- I would prefer believing Google's official guidelines than Matt Cutts who is being used by Google as their public face on the web. In the process he has to say many things on blogs & forums. --> Pagerank Explained l One can easily understand that- the public stand of Govts or big corporations are not always true from what it really is.