Google Lies: Oh My _______ Google PageRank Penalty
By: Aaron Wall
2007-10-31
In October Google updated toolbar PageRank values at least 3 times to scare people away from buying links. Sites that had their PageRank values appear penalized did not lose any traffic.
In October Google updated toolbar PageRank values at least 3 times to scare people away from buying links. Sites that had their PageRank values appear penalized did not lose any traffic. After complaints from webmasters, Google restored PageRank values of some sites that were penalized, which showed the alleged penalty had no teeth.
NONE of the announcements about Google penalizing sites are on official Google sites, such that they can control people through fear and have the media spread misinformation.
What Google Can't Obfuscate
Your rankings and traffic: If you rank you rank. You might get filtered sometime for some core keywords, but if your traffic is generally up your site probably is not penalized and/or in any danger. If you use web analytics tools and/or track general web trends (using Google Trends) and site specific trends (using Compete.com or Google Webmaster Central), you would know if Google has any issues with your site.
Your ad prices: increasingly ad relevancy and algorithmic relevancy scores will overlap. Google AdWords click costs, and thus quality scores, hints at site trust. If you can send the same ad to a competing site or to Amazon.com only to find they get the clicks cheaper then you have issue with site trust.
Indexing trends: You can see how quickly your content is getting indexed in Google and what parts of your site are getting indexed by using date based search filters.
Trusted traffic streams: they can't take away your RSS subscribers or other traffic sources. As many business become more reliant on Google a key strategy for growth will be relying less on Google.
Passing link trust: you can test if a page passes reputation by adding a unique related word to the link's anchor text on that page. After the link gets indexed search to see if the target page ranks for phrases containing that word.
What else do you think Google does a good job of obfuscating? What do you think they can't hide or obfuscate?
About
the Author:
Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, a dynamic website offering marketing tips and coverage of the search space, free SEO videos, and free SEO tools. He is a regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and publishes dozens of independent websites.
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