Jul 30 2008
Google Have Laid the Smack Down
It seems as though Google might have caught up with my link selling ways, or maybe they’ve just jiggled around their PR calculations - either way, I’ve been walloped. They updated their Pagerank a couple of days ago and all of my sites felt the wrath.
Travoholic is now at PR2. Oh the humanity! My beloved site that I falsely believed was also loved by Google has well and truly learned its lesson. Stuck in London is still, very mysteriously, a PR0. Nerdy Nomad has dropped from PR4 to PR3 which is annoying because I had been blazing a little trail up the 45n5 Top 100 List. My PR5 travel insurance site has dropped to PR 4 which is still pretty high for a site like that. The only good news is that Wanderstruck went from PR0 to PR1. Yep. That’s the best I can do.
I guess the good news, for me, is that I went on a little links selling spree before the PR tanked across most of my sites. Some people would say that could be the reason for the drop in my PR… I would have to tend to agree that Google might just be onto me after all these years.
I had stopped paying much attention to PR but now that things are collectively dropping, I might start giving it a bit more attention and do my best to get the sites back up to scratch. When link sales is such a bit chunk of my paycheque each month, I would be stupid not to try to boost it back up.
It’ll be interesting to see if people renew their links that are due to expire within the next few months.
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I've been travelling since January 2008 living off earnings from the web. Follow me as I bum around Asia and beyond, getting up to mischief and working online as I go. 
Hi Kirsty,
did the changes in PR in any way affect your SERP rankings? I noticed a drop in PR for most of my sites, too, but they still do well in searches. Most pages are down 1 PR stage (5->4 etc).
One site fell to PR0. I guess it’s because I changed the url format a few months ago but somehow forgot to block the old (still working) URLs in the server configuration => duplicate content. Unfortunately this exact site had been a PR booster for my main site. Bummer.
I do agree that link selling has a negative effect on PR. Particularly if you link from your home page or even sell a sitelink it will be a major PR drain.
Frank
Sorry to hear that google has been slapping you silly! Most of mine stayed exactly the same, I went from 4 to 3 on one site but other than that they are all good. Oh, and I got my first PR on AP so feel free to come by and drop some comments it’s only a PR2 but it’s dofollow.
Personally I have been loving your posts of late and Wanderstruck is looking fantastic too.
From what I’ve seen PR fluctuates a lot more at the higher levels. While most of my sites that have a PR 2 or 3 have remained steady, we do have one or two PR4/PR5 (respectively) that have jumped all over the place with each update. However they remain the same ranking SERPs wise, so I haven’t been all that concerned about it.
Hopefully this hasn’t put too much of a dent in your link sales!
-Frank..2.0
Isn’t the only way to get back PR, and thus extend link sales at the same price, to drop the link sales (ie. impossible)? Getting more links in won’t cut it if you’ve been selling links-the PR drop is permanent until you remove the paid links
All in all, if your rankings are still good and you are making most of your money off of affiliate sales and Google adsense, I’d be more concerned about them *really* penalizing you (ie. dropping ALL your sites completely from the index) than a little PR slap. Have a look at your income and decide whether a 75% drop in Google traffic is something you want to risk by flaunting it at them. Remember your competitors read this blog and for sure will be reporting you to Google. A good way to show your concern would be to remove the paid links in Google’s opinion I’m sure… one less chance you are really penalized and lose 70-80% of your traffic.
It’s very obvious that Google doesn’t like link selling but I think their ability to do much about it is overestimated. The most effective strategy is making people _believe_ they will be penalized for it.
Blasted GOOGLE!!!
If only they’d be nice and publish how their PR is calculated… we’d all spend much less time wondering why we get zapped or rewarded every quarter. Sorry about the slippage, you don’t deserve it.
Good luck with the attempt to get back on the horse…
-Suz
(First time reader/commenter)
You may not necessarily have been penalised at all. At least 95% of the blogs I read suffered a toolbar PR drop with the latest update, including myself (down to PR5 after having stuck it out at PR6 for about a year).