(or what happened to all our links?)
The last update to Google (the dance) has taken some time to settle down. Normally, we’d advise people not to worry about pagerank but to continue to publish good content and find quality links that will help your business.
That is still sound advice but this time there’s been a lot of online debate and confusion, and it has got a lot of people worried.
Many high traffic, respected sites have lost their page on the Google toolbar. Sites such as News.com, HP.com and Gamespot.com all present a blank toolbar and the message, “PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of this page. (0/10)”. (If you don’t have the Google toolbar, you can download it from here - http://www.toolbar.google.com)
According to Brent Winters of MarketPosition Monthly, http://www.marketposition.com:
“there have been credible reports that Google’s index of page content has not been kept in sync with their link analysis database. This along with other technical factors have caused Page Rank scores, link popularity scores, and rankings to fluctuate wildly, at least for some Web sites, over the past month”
We’ve seen the effect ourselves. The Linking Matters site has now settled down and it appears that our pagerank has dropped from 5 to 4. The number of backlinks reported by Google has also dropped from 60 to 3.
The links are still there of course and they’re still driving traffic to our site. They just don’t show up on Google. Surprisingly those missing include quality links from SearchEngineWatch.com, Pandia.com, Larry Chase’s Web Digest for Marketers, Mike Grehan’s Searchengine-report.co.uk and WilsonWeb.com.
Our referrer logs show that we have over 600 inbound links that don’t show up on Google. Indeed the results we get from a link popularity test on Google look exactly the same as they did a couple of months backs - suggesting that Google are using an older record of our site from their datacenters.
We looked at some of the sites that link to us and we found some surprising results. Linking software sites such as and http://antssoft.com/linksurvey had also scores of 0, as did http://www.linkpopularity.com.
These are all useful tools in building a linking campaign and are sites that we would trust. But like any tools they can be misused. Could Google be penalising such sites specifically? But then again others sites such as http://www.cyber-robotics.com and http://www.marketleap.com showed pageranks scores of 6 and 7 respectively.
This is obviously causing some considerable pain to website owners and some have posted to newsgroups complaining of considerable lost business. It’s hard to tell such owners that they shouldn’t panic - even though it’s still the best advice.
It’s clear that there are many changes at Google and a lot of testing going on. On e-consultancy.com, some of the apparent changes are summarised by ‘Tall Troll’:
- Artificial networks are being penalised - these are networks where website owners create interlinked sites solely for the purpose of boosting link popularity
- Old back links are being cleared out - so many sites are seeing their back link numbers fall dramatically
- Weighting of links are being changed giving more prominence to news related sites.
Punishing artificial linking strategies is to be welcomed, while weeding out old back links and increasing the importance of news stories from reliable sources will also give a clearer picture of a site’s actual link popularity.
So what should you do?
Here are our thoughts:
- Don’t panic! - the changes Google are making are designed to make it a better search engine. Their true nature will emerge over the coming weeks.
- If you are trying to artificially boost your link popularity - stop, you’re eventually going to be found out and penalised.
- Continue to concentrate on real link building - and look particularly at getting articles published on news sites to boost your linking effort efforts. (see article on Some Good Old-Fashioned Public Relations)
