The blogosphere today is in collective shock after Google downgraded the pagerank of many leading blogs and news sources. The response tends to fall into several categories: we knew it was coming, pagerank doesn’t matter, and we deserved it. Techcrunch does a pretty good job of examining the evidence behind the update:
The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, 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. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.
Here’s a table of pagerank changes organized by the percent difference:
| Pagerank -4 | Pagerank -3 | Pagerank -2 |
| Statcounter | SEO Rountable Search Engine Journal Quickonline Tips |
Forbes SF Gate The Washington Post Engadget The Blog Herald Autoblog Problogger Joystiq The Unofficial Apple Weblog |
An interesting tidbit comes from Syntagma who note that “the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.” So, it might not be easy for you to fix your linking strategy and regain Pagerank automatically.
Ironically, this coincides with GOOG hitting $666 today. And, Silicon Valley is calling us “Pagerankled.” For you people out there running blogs, an immediate solution is the following:
- Make sure you nofollow any links that you don’t directly control
- Avoid using static link-farms like directories, like linking to every blog in your network from every page
- Don’t let your commenters add links to their sites
Here’s an example of the link distribution of my site after I’ve properly annotated some links with nofollow:
The green areas (header, footer, content, and some meta data) represent regular links, the red areas (advertising, sidebar links, tags, and related stories) are nofollow links, and the blue areas are dynamic links (javascript widgets) which don’t need updating. I am not sure if I want to nofollow anything else–what do you think?
Update: Forbes weighs in, “it could also be Google simply taking into account the growth of the Internet.”