It is huge news today around the blogosphere that Google PageRanks of large sites have been hurt. DailyBlogTips had some of the first info on the topic and most of the key information was from Andy Beard. Sites penalised are as follows:
Here is a list that I gathered with big blogs that supposedly lost PR on this issue:
Update: It looks like mainstream websites that were selling links were also penalized:
Andy Beard thought the drop was because of text selling which was reported about a week or so ago. This turns out not to be the case.
Duncan Riley over at Techcrunch has reported that Google didnt drop the page ranks because of the selling of text links, but because of link farms. Links farms are where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links.
This all comes a week after the linking characteristics of Techcrunch was analysed. Where it was reported that 1/3 of all Techcrunch outgoing links where to related Techcrunch sites. Hence, link farms do explain why the Techcrunch page rank hasnt changed, but the Crunchbase ranking is now at 0.
These changes will affect a lot of blog networks that survive on text link ads and related sales that depend on strong Google page ranks. A drop from a PR7 to PR4 should really affect traffic too heavily but it will make the tough job of selling ads much tougher. In the coming months and years I think we will see a lot of small blog networks starting to struggle and trying to find another way to survive.
About 4 months ago now I saw a decrease from a PR4 to a PR1 and I found it difficult to work out why, and about a month ago when Google announced that selling text link ads would bring in a punishment, I finally found out why.
