Have you been hit with a Pagerank drop?
Many popular websites and blogs have been hit with Pagerank decreases in the last days. Most went down two points (some even three) from one day to the other. The Pagerank drop does not seem to have an influence on other factors like website traffic or Adsense. It does seem pretty random though, some websites get hit, others that do the same do not get hit at all.
It was noted that this is currently a manual process which could explain why it seems to be so random. My site has been hit as well dropping 2 points from PR5 to PR3. I would not care that much if someone would assure me that there would not be any future ill-effects but I do not want to take any risks here.
I decided to remove all paid links from my website which was not that hard because I did not make much money anyway. I can see that this could be a huge problem for guys like John Chow who make thousands of Dollars selling links.
The Webmaster Tools that are accessible if you have a Google Account offer a link on the main page that is entitled Request reconsideration. Webmasters who were punished by Google may ask for an reconsideration if they got rid of the factor that penalized them in first place.
While I'm not sure that this is about selling links and not some general PR drop across the board I don't want to take chances here. I did ask for a reconsideration and hope that I will receive a positive answer from Google once they checked that my site is no longer selling links.
I'm wondering what those webmasters will be doing who did not get hit until now. It currently really does not matter that much but it could hurt a lot of people if the websites would get penalized further in the Google search engine.
Advertisement
We got hit with a 2 point drop as well, from 6 to 4. We’re not about to remove our text links though until Google steps up and explains their reasoning behind the drop.
I keep hearing of pagerank drops that happened in the last few days but nobody ever mentioned a pagerank increase. I actually experienced a jump from PR 0 to PR 3 on my website (which was even encountering – and is still encountering – some server load issues which we were in the process of resolving).
I was so shocked by the PageRank MEGA JUMP which appears to have happened overnight and it made me do a little research which led me to finding out about this PageRank incidence (and landing on this page and several others).
Didn’t anybody else experience this increase? Seems the change favored we the “small” guys :D
BTW: I dont have ANY paid links on the site and barely any incoming links. Just aggregating blogs from my country.
I am not too sure what’s going on myself. I had a page rank of 3 and it drop 2 level.
Craig to clarify it. With website traffic I meant all sources of traffic including Google Search Engine traffic. My traffic is still on the rise, hope I do get an answer from Google about this situation.
How are the sites’ SERPs, search engine sourced traffic and most importantly, the sites that bought links from them doing?
You mentioned, “website traffic” hasn’t been effected, does that include Google search traffic?
I assume it does but just want to make sure.
Not that I am anybody who’s opinion means much but it would seem to me that the more likely cause of the various sites dropping Toolbar PageRank may be due to Google adjusting the scale used to convert internal PageRank to Toolbar PageRank.
If that is the case and the conversion is logarithmic then it would stand to reason that higher toolbar PageRank sites would appear to be hit “harder” simply because they are higher up the logarithmic curve.
John Chow also posts an article talk about that, his site also drop to 4. Dailyblogtips.com has an article that talk about Google PageRank. It lists some main sites are dropping. Statcounter (from 10 to 6), Engadget (from 7 to 5), Search Engine Journal (from 7 to 4), Quick Online Tips (from 6 to 3)…, even some mainstream sites are dropping: Washington Post (from 7 to 5), Forbes.com (from 7 to 5), Sun Times (from 7 to 5)…
More detail:
http://www.johnchow.com/google-pagerank-update-and-its-all-down/
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-changing-the-pagerank-algorithm/
We got hit with a 2 point drop as well, from 6 to 4. We’re not about to remove our text links though until Google steps up and explains their reasoning behind the drop.
Google is acting like monopolist :>
They want to force people buying links only from them ;]
Not good… Internet should be free and there should be free way to earn money.