It seems that a hot topic is about Google making some changes. These changes have caused a lot of blogs to have lower PageRanks. Why? Everyone has their own ideas.
- Removing AdSense
- Using WidgetBucks
- Selling text links
PageRank isn’t actually all that important to me, but it seems to be important to advertisers.
I decided to check if my PageRank of zero has changed. I didn’t expect it to so soon, but it turns out that it’s now a three! A three? How is that possible? The Soft Tech Reviews domain is only about four months old. I haven’t done very much except write in the blog.
So, the top blogs go down and Soft Tech Reviews goes up. Did Google make a mistake? But like Darren Rowse from ProBlogger said, Forget About PageRank and Build a Better Blog. Although I now have a PageRank of three, I’m not going to become obsessed about it.
it could be a bit of everything but the major part is i think excessive linking and text links. Darren Rowse didn’t have text links ads but lots of text links in his post — so does John Chow, Engadget, Forbes and all the others that dropped badly. Honestly don’t think they’ll penalize you for taking off adsense… if they did, that’s just not right. I can see why they’ll penalize you for lots of text links and text link ads though.
the fuzzy part about it now is whether google will penalize you for not having no follow tags. But by your blog PR increase, it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
In my blog I link a lot (in posts) and my PR is still the same — which further contradicts what I just said about text links. Only Google knows exactly how their search engines work. Someone leaking out their secrets could earn a lot of money!
at the end of the day, you and Darren Rowce is right — don’t worry about PR but the quality of your blog posts.
Here is an interesting twist on Andy Beard’s site (if you haven’t already read it):
http://andybeard.eu/2007/10/pagerank-update-2.html
Thanks for sharing that link, I didn’t read it until now. As long as my PageRank stays at a three (so I can feel loved by Google?), Google can update all it wants.