Google goes gorilla on webmasters

Oct 26, 2007 in The Net

Well I’ve been away these past days, with work over my head and a very important, off town internet copywriting conference and like most of the time I’m afk, something big happens. Yeah, if you don’t live underneath a rock or something you’d know by now about the infamous Google slamming. They’ve literally handed out penalties, after penalties to poor webmasters all around the world, often lowering their PR by -1, but in some cases by -2, -3 I’ve heard about -4 in some extreme cases. International professional bloggers haven’t been spared as well, John Chow, got a -2 penalty from PR 6 to 4, he was already banned by google from SERPS, so that was pretty obvious, but what about Copyblogger and Problogger ? They got penalized as well with -2 and neither of them have sold a link on their blogs, ever. Wtf is Google doing?

A while back I talked about, what I thought to be the beginning of the PR update, when Google started penalizing linkfarms, spammy websites etc, but now they’ve started hunting down all the blogs that have sold or are suspicious of selling links or other against Google TOS activities. Interesting is the fact that the respective downgraded blogs and websites haven’t reported any particular dropping in SERPs or search engine traffic. I’m beginning to be more and more skeptical on the true value of PR and once again I’ll have to advice to be more indiferent to PR and all things related, there’s more to life then that. This recent massive cleansing is a sign of the imminent fast approaching ultimate update, that’s overdue for some months now.

Read more about the subject at hand, at AndyBeard, Daily Blog Tips and Search Engine Land.

The Google goes gorilla on webmasters by Tibi Puiu, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

13 Replies

Bull3t
Oct 26th, 2007 at 9:44 am

Strangely enough my Google Page Rank has not changed. Any idea as to why they have changed? I see so many posts regarding Google Page Rank and how to boost it, but I have followed no tutorials or moaned about my own and it automatically updated to 4 quite soon after I started posting on my blog. There are so many people that worry madly about their websites Google Page Rank but I really don’t see why.
Tibi Puiu
Oct 26th, 2007 at 9:52 am

I think you’re in danger of any Google penalizing, the websites affected by Google’s mini-update are only those who are considered abusive and thus been thought a lesson. People care about PR, because their moneywolves, as they want more money from the link sales, I guess Google has something different in mind.
Brad Detchevery
Oct 26th, 2007 at 11:16 am

Yep, it happened over at onemansblog too. Stupid little green bar. I think the next move will be to just replace it with a random number generator.

In the end, I suppose it will make it harder for people trying to sell links from their site based upon how much green they show I guess
Tibi Puiu
Oct 26th, 2007 at 11:22 am

you’re not in danger*, that came out wrong
wtricks
Oct 26th, 2007 at 11:31 am

The bad thing is that google does this to the big guys in the industry, the good thing is that the small ones weren’t affected. “Nice” strategy from Google
Tibi Puiu
Oct 26th, 2007 at 11:44 am

Well yeah, the big ones are a lot more exposed and thus more likely to get in trouble when breaking tos etc.
rapidshare search
Oct 29th, 2007 at 3:24 am

very nice. gorilla association very nice =))
technology
Oct 30th, 2007 at 4:49 pm

Google seems to have come down heavy on sites that sell links. The interesting thing is that even if a site doesn’t sell links, they may be hit indirectly with a penalty.

If a site has a number of incoming links from sites that sell links and those sites are all downgraded in terms of PR, that will in turn affect the original site.
Ed Kohler
Nov 4th, 2007 at 5:24 pm

I’ve found that if I use marketing tactics that are aligned with Google’s goals of providing great content to searchers, I sleep better at night.
MSN hacker
Mar 22nd, 2008 at 11:12 am

Google is one of the most biggest search engines world wide. Google is not only an search engine, but a adverting company too.
jim
Sep 24th, 2009 at 7:30 am

If a site has a number of incoming links from sites that sell links and those sites are all downgraded in terms of PR, that will in turn affect the original site.

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