Google Takes Another PR Swipe At Top Bloggers
It seems Google took another bite out of the PageRank of several sites such as Courtney Tuttle, John Chow, and many others. The thinking is that this is an “attention getter” for all blogs that buy and sell links or reviews with the purpose of passing PR. Google obviously wants to bury the paid link industry and if the sites that they consider offenders don’t pay heed they’ll probably take even more action against them.
As I’ve said before in this article, Solving the Toolbar PR and Paid Links Crisis, and this one, Google Lowers PR on Some Sites, Google is treading into territory that Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, and others have gone into. That’s monopoly territory.
Eventually I suspect that Google will have to completely separate search and rankings from advertising, either by consent or, if worse comes to worse for them, by court order. What they’re doing now is similar to what Microsoft tried to do with PC manufacturers being required to license Windows on all PCs they shipped.
As I mentioned, PageRank is an inadaquate metric and, as we see, a badly broken one as well. Hopefully they will straighten this out soon enough either by replacing it or being more transparent about it.
What do you think? Leave me a comment and let me know.
Pretty crazy isn’t it Frank.
PageRank is absolutely a terrible metric and hopefully this whole fiasco will help people to see that. Hopefully it brings down some of the sites that obtained their rankings by purchasing links as well.
Thanks for stopping by Court,
I wonder if they’re just testing out a new algorithm or if they’re changing the PR of your site and the others manually. I guess they could do in manually. They’ve got to put those 1000 newly minted code monkeys they just hired to work somewhere.