Just wanted to throw out this possibility -- is the PR drop real, or just perceived? Could it be just a trick to unsettle people buying and selling links? Before you answer, think about this. When Google divulges PR to the toolbars that we use to check PageRank, that's not necessarily the same PR that Google uses internally. It could be that Google hasn't messed with ANY site's ACTUAL PageRank, just the PERCEIVED PageRank. The only reason I mention this is that I've looked at several sites that took a HUGE hit in their PageRank, and yet their traffic has remained fairly steady. With PageRank being an important part of the ranking algorithm, how could this be? If you're site goes from a PR 4 to PR 0, that means that it has no link popularity. That means that only on-page factors can contribute to its rank in the search results. Surely, this would cause a tremendous drop in traffic. But, so far I have yet to see a tremendous drop in traffic. Makes me wonder if Google is just trying to rattle us, but hasn't actually changed anything "under the hood". Any thoughts? Is it possible Google would do this? Or, is this just some stupid conspiracy theory?
I have heard something similar, and think that the PR drop is probably just perceived. I think it may be to balance things out. If too many sites become PR6 and PR7, the rank has no meaning. I think what we are seeing is a "re-averaging" of the PR.
It certainly does feel that way. But i'm sure they have some other ulterior motive, its more likely they would do stuff that will help them to boost their profits eg eg adwords.
all I can add to this is my own personal experience, all pages increased in PR without a single drop on 100+ pagranked pages on my sites - and traffic has SLIGHTLY increased, but no more than is organically happening anyway. Note: Im not running any non content sites...
Adwords and Text Links are completely seperate things. You DO NOT get SERP or Pagerank weight at all with Adwords, unlike with text links your manipulating the pagerank system and serps, which as a webmaster I know is wrong and called cheating. Selling text links has always been against Google TOS.
No, this is real. People lost pageranks because they were manipulating pagerank and SERPs with text links, it has been stated on the Google TOS it is cheating and also matt cutt stated you must use the nofollow tag with text link sales. Anyway you cut it, where your buying text links if you didn't pay for them your link would be there, hence the manipluation.
I don't think I agree. Are you saying page rank doesn't affect SERPs? I can't believe that would be true. Isn't that the whole point of Google? And for sites that get a lot of traffic from google searches, a drop in SERPs would most certainly affect traffic. So it may affect it indirectly, but it affects it nonetheless.
Pagerank doesn't directly effect your SERPs, majority of people with the PR penality just loss PR and had the same SERPs. Many low PR sites outrank high PR sites in SERPs. Where have you been?
Spot on ... that is the new reality of PR - for example, one of my sites has gone from a PR of 4 to 0 this year. This site has hardly been developed at all over that period & certainly not publicised. Traffic and SERP's have remained pretty well constant over that period.
That sparked a little idea in my head. Do you know in Vista that gaming rating to see how your machine is rated to play games? Many top end computers are based out of 5 but the scale can go much higher, because in 2 years time when computers are a lot faster every bottom end computer would be ranked 5 and the top ones even higher? What I think Google is seeing here is a lot of good sites having a high PR. But these sites are getting blending into the excellent sites with a PR 9/10. The result of this is that it has devalued the "amount/price" of the high PR. As a result Google has dropped a lot of ranks. Many people then saw this as "OMG! Google hates me". But in reality they have just made the bar higher. Many people saw no serps change, which kind of backs up the fact that although peoples PR has gone down, Serps have not. As a result (approixmatly) the new pr of say 5 used to be the equivalent of say 8. This is probably not 100% correct, but it gives you the idea that the rank has been devalued to make it harder to get a good PR because there are so many sites. A site would no have to have exceptional back links to get a really good PR. This PR thing is sort of like currency in a way. There is to much of it due to inflation (high pr's) so we are going to cut the value to even it out a bit. Just an idea.
I can't help it, people keep complaining about not being able to sell text links, its manipulation and cheating any way you cut it! Just pisses me off that so many webmasters think that because a system is broken you should cheat it.