Google is losing webmasters battle

Oct 27
14:36

2007

Paul Easton

Paul Easton

  • Share this article on Facebook
  • Share this article on Twitter
  • Share this article on Linkedin

Google losing battle, the ruduction of Page rank and paid linking

mediaimage

A top Google ranking is a battle on a daily basis for many companies.

There are whole business models build out of getting a top ranking in Google and to a smaller extend,Google is losing webmasters battle Articles the other major search engines.

You could say Google has unknowingly created billions in business turnover, from others trying to outwit them.

In the battle of getting rankings which has turned to the power of links, has launched full services around this concept. Its not new just more obvious now especially due to the explosion of blogging.

Some of theses services buy and sell focused text links. In the same way ebay does, its a matter of bringing together buyers and sellers. Now buying link pricing can be set in different ways: a single purchase cost using services like payperpost.com and reviewme.com blog post services, or a pay per month option which is used by other services such as text link brokers and many other providers.

Now most pricing is based on PR of the pages the links are on. Recently Google updated its page rank and many sites took a large drop. Now we are talking about the dropping of a PR 10 down to a PR 6 which happened to a site called statcounter.

Statcounter.com is a free web based statistics program which allows you get good statistics on traffic for your website.

The best feature is being able to hide any counter display on your page. I recently found out that even if the counter display is hidden- it still creates focused text links back to its home page (thats another whole story)

Now some quick research into statcounter after the PR drop- they still rank for over 500 different competitive 2 and 3 word keywords. So the PR drop would have no effect on traffic at all. They do sell text links and this has been suggested as a reason for the drop in page rank (to discourage this action)

The dropping of PR is most likely just an adjustment of its numbers- its happened before and will probably happen again- and quote a well known SEO company:

My guess is that the toolbar PR penalty is just that -- a lowering of visible PR in order to make a statement

If sites keep rising in Page Rank then it has no value. So its like a re-valuing of the dollar under inflation.

If you are not selling text links, it wont really effect you. This fits together with Googles recent statements about the selling of text links as they do not approve if they are purchased for the sole purpose of influencing search results (which most if not all are)

Google has come out an said that no follow tags should be placed on these links and also asked for webmasters to report sites that are selling links. This tells me that they are getting desperate to stop the purchase links for rank sites.

So is buying links a good thing or not?. Well Google is against it, however if its done correctly and not abused like some have, its a win-win for blog owners and business owners.

Like most SEO it should not be the only method of getting links, however it could be used well by those with reasonable budget and long term business plan. I dont pass judgement on whether I agree or disagree whether it is the right thing to do. The type of links and how to buy is a whole other article&&