Here are some posts from Rand, Andy and Daniel on today’s toolbar hysteria. What I find most interesting about all the blog posts popping up is the constant use of the word penalty. To me, that just isn’t an accurate description; at least not in the sense that anything has changed recently.
Google has stated many times publicly that they do track and monitor sites that either sell links, or engage in excessive cross-linking. And they have also been pretty clear about the fact that they have the ability to prevent a site from passing juice, without necessarily impacting that site’s own ability to rank. Now that’s a pretty cool system, but the problem Google faces is the fact that is a) most people have no idea that there are two sides to PR, and b) the amount of green showing on the toolbar is still the primary factor used to determine price in the text link market.
Sites like Forbes haven’t been passing any significant juice for quite some time. Yet Forbes continues to have a steady stream of advertisers willing to pay rates based on the perceived value displayed in the toolbar. That’s pretty much a no-win situation for Google when it comes to winning the war on paid links. As long as mainstream sites can charge high prices based on their toolbar PR, there will always be more sites trying to sell links than Google could ever police by hand. So they can either spend a shitload of time and money trying to explain to people that just cause you see it, doesn’t mean it’s real, or they can simply adjust the toolbar score for offending sites to a level that more accurately represents the site’s ability to pass juice.
If you were Google, which approach would you take? For me, it would be a no-brainer. Reducing the amount of PR displayed in the toolbar is the equivalent of the Health department forcing restaurants to hang a sign with their inspector’s grade on it in the front window. Regardless of how nice those restaurants look from the outside, most people will think twice about dining there if the sign in the window has a C on it. And the revenue loss the sign creates motivates the restaurant owner to figure out how to get rid of all the roaches in the kitchen.
In the big picture, I don’t think this approach is going to make the text link market disappear. But it might very well force the big brand sites to stop selling links. And doing that will go a long way in helping Google paint the picture that buying and selling text links is a dangerous and evil practice used only by the worst of spammers.
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That is really a point I made 2 weeks ago when I got my first penalty. Google in their description of TBPR state it is an indication of the quality of a site.
If they can overnight tell their users that that is no longer the case, and it is purely an aid to tell link buyers how much they should pay for their links, I would have no problem at all.
I concluded then that Google are telling fibs about the quality of my site, and whether that is defamation.
Are advertisers buying links on Forbes for the linkjuice, branding, or traffic? Any three may be the case.
I suspect in the long run, Google making PR an indication of how much link juice is passed would lead to more link selling by a broader range of people. High traffic prestige sites will still sell– for traffic and branding. But they probably won’t switch to no follow because nofollow wouldn’t benefit them in anyway.
Yes, it doesn’t look or smell like a real, hard penalty. So if it actually is a political statement, as you (and Andy and a few others, myself included) seem to agree, what does that tell us about the degradation of the – publicized – PR concept as such?
But then I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see that “for entertainment purposes” crappy toolbar being deployed once more as a tool for social engineering.
As for paid or non-paid links: A link by any other name is – what? I’ve had one extensive argument with Adam Lasnik a while back about Goo’s claim they could divine a link’s (or a linker’s) “intention”, the schmucks…
Because as lucia points out: linkjuice, branding, traffic aren’t necessarily synonymous and it’s ludicrous to pretend otherwise.
So what will it boil down to in the end – “don’t ask, don’t tell”? Link selling and buying in wink-wink, nudge-nudge, “know what I mean? know what I mean?”, nudge-nudge mode like in that Monty Python spot?
Very probably because I really don’t see them algorithmifying that distinction anytime soon. Meh.
If anyone who has been “penalized” by the loss of green pixels wants to come forward with some hard data on lost organic traffic, I’d be happy to look at it. So far, it looks like no penalty at all, just less toolbar PR to sell.
Great point Greg. Have you seen any evidence of any of these sites actually dropping in SERP rank? That’s what I’m asking in my blog post:
http://www.webconnoisseur.com/blog/seo/googles-pagerank-drop-seos-dissapoint-me/
Because I haven’t seen any evidence of it yet.
Not as of yet. And I don’t think anyone will. The idea is to simply take PR out of the sales equation. It wouldn’t make much sense to prevent a site like Forbes from ranking. There’s a ton of quality content on that site. And there’s also plenty of benefits involved with advertising on Forbes. Google just doesn’t want juice to be one of them.
the adjustment does not appear to be dealt evenly, because the sites I manage with average pr of 4 remained the same, making them more valuable now.
I wonder how exponentially more difficult the the jumps from 4 to 5 and 5 to 6 will be now
Who cares what the damn toolbar says. 2, 5, 8. If that factors into your link buying equation you should be flipping hamburgers at burger king anyway.
What you say is absolutely correct. To be honest, I think buying links is def. worthwhile and selling links isn’t usually that good an idea – with some exceptions. when you sell links, especially if they are site-wide, then what’s the point in creating a hole for link juice to escape from your site? Couldn’t that juice be better spent on your own site?
Somehow I just can’t get picture people at the Washington Post being too worked up about this.
since i’ve reached 0 with pagerank, i’m not gaining a penny from links (no customers!). And from yersterday I’ve also seen a great decrease in visitors from google search engine. I fear that pr is related to the search engine position….
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