Google’s Scary Halloween PageRank Update

It’s not the PageRank update everyone was eagerly waiting for but Google has recently been tinkering with the PageRank on many sites by manually adjusting them down. It was rumored to be Google’s way of punishing sites that were selling text links to game the search engine rankings through PageRank. Earlier today Google deployed the second phase of the PageRank “update” by knocking the PageRank of another handful of sites, including some sites that were already hit during the first phase.

While the obvious answer to what Google is doing is an attack on the sale of text link ads, I think there is much more to it than that. If the issue was just the sale of text link ads, they could keep PageRank as an internal number, and reset the publicly available PageRank value known as the ToolBar PageRank (TBPR) to PR0 for every website. If every website had a PR value of zero there would be no market for text link ads. Brokers such as text link ads would disappear and the sale of text links would slow to a crawl. By keeping the PR values internally, it could still be used in the existing algorithm to keep the SERP quality high.

It appears that Google was after the link farms and large blog networks. Many of the sites that had their PageRank slashed were members of large networks. Many more were blogs that were involved in past linking schemes designed primarily to boost their PageRank. These activities include link trains, blog contests with linking requirements, etc. The reason that Google had to take action against blogs that were part of large networks was due to the sheer size of some of the networks. The Weblogs Inc. network is so large that any site that is a part of it automatically gets hundreds of links (from high PR sites) automatically boosting its PR.

It will be interesting to see how everything plays out, as I believe there are more rounds of “updates” coming from Google to address the remaining sites with inflated PageRank scores. Halloween 2007 may be remembered as one of the scariest PageRank updates for those that depend heavily on it for advertising revenue. If you’re part of a large website/blog network or if you’ve participated in many link schemes, you should check your PageRank.

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