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Google Lowered My PageRank, Was My Website Penalized?

A friend of mine recently emailed me to ask if his site was penalized for selling links. The same email went on to say that he is ranking better than ever in Google, even for his core category single word query, but his toolbar PageRank score dropped by one.

Google Stats Are Wonky

Many of Google’s webmaster stats are rarely updated and/or intentionally inaccurate. And many stats change on a whim, while reflecting no real change in the structure of the web.

PageRank is the Wonkiest Stat of Them All

Toolbar PageRank scores are only updated about once every three months. In between updates hundreds of millions or billions of web pages are added to Google’s index. These new pages absorb PageRank and generally cause the PageRank of existing pages to be lowered. Pages that were a high PR 7 might become a low PR7, pages that were a low PR7 might become a high PR6, and so on. The one exception to this rule is that if your site’s inbound link authority grows faster than the web does then your PageRank score goes up.

PageRank is recomputed in near real time and toolbar PageRank scores are perpetually outdated. If you are starting from a PR0 and get a few quality links then of course you should expect a PageRank greater than 0 on the next update, but even the fact that your pages are getting indexed means you have some share of PageRank even if the toolbar does not show anything. In some cases the toolbar not only shows outdated data, but sometimes it even sticks, showing you the PageRank score of another site or showing all pages as 0.

It is no coincidence that Google chose not to update toolbar PageRank scores in a great deal of time before spreading more propaganda against paid links, and then launched a partial data push (how often do they do that)? This way when they finally update PageRank and many pages have a slightly lower PageRank score many webmasters will wonder “was I penalized?”

Why the Hate for Paid Links?

As Michael Gray rightly points out:

If Google wins what’s going to happen is the market will go underground. You’re going to have to “know a guy” to get you links. For a lot of people that removes any options, leaving the only option being Google. Does anybody really believe that the PHD’s at the plex haven’t applied any “gaming theory” to this model and figured out this will make them even more profitable? (c’mon we’re googly we’d never do that) Once the advertisers are underground, market forces of scarcity will take effect, and prices will skyrocket. So even if you don’t believe in paid links, you should still get involved in the debate, if for no other reason than to keep the advertising market free and open instead of under the control of Google.

If making PageRank function requires hand editing isn’t that an indication that PageRank is irrelevant? Why not change they relevancy algorithms rather than trying to scare people?

Deflecting Blowback

Danny Sullivan posted about Google’s latest battle against paid links. I followed up on the absurdity of the situation, and in response to our posts Danny and I were both called liars. Which might seem like a fair assessment of the situation to a person new to search marketing.

Why would Google make an official webmaster announcement, but provide no quotes for the story and not publish it on any of their own websites? Probably because they know what they are doing is illegal, and want to be detached from the story to not look like overzealous dictators.

What Google Can’t Cloak

The two things Google can’t cloak are the visitors they are sending you and how much they charge you for a click. Sure their ad auctions have a hidden “quality” factor to them, but that is just an indication of how much they trust your ad account and your site. If Google is sending you more traffic and ranking your site better then you have nothing to worry about.

My friend’s lower PageRank score was an anomaly. It was irrelevant, because at the core, his site is ranking better and Google is sending him more traffic. At the end of the day Google can put smoke an mirrors wherever they like, but if your search traffic trend is up you are not penalized.

Why Search Traffic Can Go Down Without a Penalty

1. Competition: if the competition is out-marketing you then your site might slip.

2. Seasonal traffic patterns: if you go out of a high demand season it makes sense that your traffic may drop even if rankings improve.
3. Automated filters: In some cased individual pages might get automatically filtered for being too closely aligned with a particular term, but they can usually overcome that by loosening the focus of those pages and their inbound anchor text. That is why it is important for an SEO to track their statistics, to know where they are and how reliant they are on each phrase. In some cases I have seen sites which ranked for many additional new queries but got filtered for one of their highest traffic terms. The page focus and anchor text was loosened and the page came back ranking better than ever.

Social Media Marketing: The New SEO? (Search Engine Land)
Fall is the time of year when we start to look at where search marketing is heading. Looking at the latest search marketing conference agendas, articles, and online news in the SEM space, it certainly appears that social media marketing and networking are the wave of the future. To a certain extent, they are. Social media, and social networking in particular, create a back-and-forth …

SEO for Firefox Updated to Include Compete.com Data

I just updated SEO for Firefox to include Compete.com website rank and Compete.com monthly uniques. If you leave Compete.com in on demand mode it tends to work quite well. I am also going to ping the guys at Compete.com to ensure the automatic mode gets to be pretty reliable too. Compete.com data is far better than Alexa because it has less of a webmaster bias.

Google Corrects Domain Name Spelling Errors (Sometimes, Anyway)

SEL highlighted that Google is correcting domain spelling errors. Which works to block some typos, but in some instances is pushing traffic away from smaller domains toward more authoritative websites.

Good Job Google

Here is an example of the spell correction working right…

Lets say you want to go to my blog located at search for www.seobook.com/nodd they offer the correct URL as a suggestion.

Bad Job Google

Now lets say that I misspell a filename. What if I typed www.seibook.com/bok (If you add a second o to the word book in the filename this URL exists). What does Google do? Even when I am not signed in, Google STILL recommends people go to SeoBook.com, to the URL seobook.com/images/spellcheck.png”>

In that last case correcting the URL and keeping the people on the same site only took changing 1 letter, but Google decided instead to change a letter in the domain name, and change 3 in the filename!

Why Not Fix This?

What about errors in the domain extension? If you type in ASP.nt (leaving out the e in net) Google does not correct that spelling error. If you type in ebay.cm (ebay.com leaving out the o) Google does not correct that error. Why launch a feature such as this without correcting the most common errors?

Newsletter Nightmares
Newsletters are a fine thing. They help you keep in touch with your customers and remind them how much they enjoy your products. With your brand fresh in the mind of your subscribers they re more likely to buy from you again assuming you manage the relationship correctly….
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Key Net Names Inks Deer Ridge Custom Shoes SEO Deal (PR.com)
Key Net Names a leading Organic Search Engine Placement and one of the top internet marketing firms would like to announced that it has signed an SEO contract with Deer Ridge Custom Shoes. [PR.com - September 26, 2007]

But is Free Content Actually Free?

Brian Clark just wrote a great free 22 page report about…

• why you should ignore the trap of free content + ads as a business model

• how creating and marketing free content and promotes information pollution
• how to package and sell information
• how you are not like a typical web user
• why you need to take advantage of new trends and ignore trends of old
• what brands actually sell
• how primitive the web is

Many of the points he hits on are similar to my post titled Death of the Book: Publishers Will Become Interactive Media Artists with the exception that Brian is more eloquent and used much better formatting. If you only read one thing this week, make sure Brian’s Teaching Sells report is on that short list.

The Beauty of Editorial Review Sites

Once you have a trusted brand you can create low value white label brands that are given a free pass by search engine editors based on the trust of your core brand. These can feed back profits to your main site in many ways, including allowing you to:

• filter link juice to your mother brand site, which is especially useful for temporal news or in categories where link building is tough

• create additional ad inventory that sells at the premium CPM rate of your core brand (see also: Extending the Reach / Circulation of a Web Based Content Site & Ad Network)
• extend to new markets without requiring you to risk tarnishing your main brand

There are many ways to extend, including

• subdomains (eBay is the master of subdomains)

• related brand sites (US News & World Report launched RankingsAndReviews.com, which touches virtually every high paying category)
• editorial channels tracking the marketplace of your main brand (Yahoo! Buzz published a blog post titled “About That Ringtone“)
• sites owned by fake affiliates that you claim no ownership of (use affiliate software to track your sister sites and remove blame from your company)

What tips to do you have for extending your reach while protecting your brand?

Find All My Domain Names

Some of my domain names were registered as a joke (haggisdiet.com was a bet against Andy Hagans), and it wouldn’t be hard to register domains in the name of another person. Having said that, I doubt few people put my name on their domain names, and now you can look up a list of domains owned by a person by using Registrant Search. If you have thin affiliate sites that rank well in Google and are not using fake whois data then now might be a little late to start.

Via Domain Name News I recently discovered Sold Names, which aggregates publicly available price data for domain sales. You can also view last week’s sales at DN Journal. If you find someone underselling a domain name browse through their inventory and see if they have any others worth buying.

Google is Becoming Wikipedia Without the Talk Page

In a recent post about paid links, Danny Sullivan wrote about how Google’s army of engineers are going to start hand editing PageRank scores if they think you are selling links, which is a move that wreaks of desperation.

Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about. …

Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.

In contrast, if you’re a smaller site not deemed as important to relevancy, a harsher punishment of a ranking penalty may be dealt out.

Introducing the New, Corporate Web

If they actually follow through with any of this then Google, which touts the value of PageRank, clearly no longer believes in its value. They already show stale data in their toolbar, and might as well scrap the whole thing and start fresh. Their mind control exercise is getting a bit obnoxious.

Now they are editing PageRank and relevancy scores. They don’t edit based on quality of information but based on method of promotion. And if it is a corporation breaking Google’s arbitrary shifting ruleset then Google simply decides not to edit, or only fakes that they care.

Google is Wikipedia, but Worse

With this news of more hand editing, Google also shows that they are biased against small webmasters are and actively trying to screw over small webmasters to increase their corporate profits.

Google is becoming much like the Wikipedia, where generalists wrongly assume topical knowledge greater than that of the real topical experts. In some cases Wikipedia is saved by talk pages and community participation that allow the experts to be heard. Google has no talk page though, which means that Google search results will become a dried out and dumbed down version of the web.

The Real Problem With Half Truths & Hand Editing

The response to every move is a counter move. So if they actually try to squash link buying then webmasters will look for indirect ways to purchase links. Google also offers tips on how to sculpt PageRank, but sculpt to much and suddenly the intent is changed, and you are banned.

Why leave such a thing up to a single Google engineer making a judgement call? If they want to increase the quality of the web they need to be more innovative in encouraging the creation of good content, not make people afraid to invest into creating content only to watch a Google engineer kill it.

Link bait is good when you are a large corporation or are syndicating Google spin, but if you are too successful at link bait they will ban your site for it. They did it to one of my sites and they even banned one of their own site.

If you are a small webmaster and get judged by Google don’t expect compassion. They have no talk page, and they already paid an AdSense publisher to steal all your content. They don’t need you.

How to Do Well in Google

If you are a webmaster assume that Google is lying to you and ignore them. If their view of the web and webmaster advice are reduced to half truths and lies then we can only hope something a bit more honest will come out of their downfall.