So Google updated it's pagerank about a week and a half ago and a lot of people are pissed to the point where they are taking action against Google. I mean to the point where they are disallowing the googlebot to even index their sites. Vlad is one of them. He's using disallow now in his robots.txt file to basically tell the Googlebot to keep right on moving as it hits his site. His pagerank went from a 4 to a 0 in this last update and I can totally understand being upset.

I don't think disallowing the Googlebot to index his site is the smartest move even though he probably feels like it's the only thing he can do to get back at them. In reality it is only hurting him further. When you live in a country you are governed by it's laws and you have to follow all of them or else you face the consequences and that is true for the web. We are living under Google's rule and we have to act accordingly or else we get our wrists(sites) slapped.

But you say,, Google doesn't tell us all the rules so how are we supposed to know?

Well when you've been online long enough studying Google, optimizing for Google, you know exactly what they want. It's the reason they went public. They are after all a business who has to please their shareholders. A corporation must continue to see increasing profits or it is dieing.

If they make it difficult to rank in their results pages it's partly due to them wanting you to use their adwords service which anyone can pay for and immediately rank #1 if you pay them enough per click. Of course they want to keep their search results relevant because that's how they gathered their following to begin with, but it's not that important anymore. They know they have enough people who will gladly pay them for those positions they could make the entire top ten results ads and people would still use them for search.

What they don't want is webmasters or SEO's manipulating their SERPS even though they created search engine optimization with the advent of their toolbar which displayed a websites Pagerank which is a visual indicator of how popular a website is. With Pagerank webmasters could visually see how supposedly popular their sites were and everyone was soon in a rush to increase it by getting as many backlinks as possible. That even meant buying text links for the sole purpose of increasing the flow of Pagerank to their website thus boosting their PR.

Buying text links is artificially increasing your link popularity. It's why businesses like text-link-ads.com and linkworth.com exist. It's also why businesses like payperpost cropped up. Pay a fee and you can get links to your site. Google does not like this as it's not natural linking but paid. And they aren't the ones getting paid. They make zero money when you rank #1 in their SERPS naturally.

Google's known about people buying massive text links for years now so that's nothing new. First the sites buying text links were penalized. If all the sudden you had 50k new backlinks coming from 2 main sites they could easily tell. But now it seems like they might be going after the sites selling text links. Either way you should be careful about buying and selling text links. I don't think it will go away because links are still the most important thing in SEO. SEO's have always been smart on how to get around the actions of search engines to thwart their activities so new methods of flying under the radar will be invented.

When I saw Vlad's post about losing his pagerank I commented on what I think is the reason for his sites PR demise. Now I only speculated about this because I don't know his SEO strategies if any but what I could tell is that he like many other bloggers link out way too much on their blogs. You know, including every widget available and freely linking out to blogs, affiliate programs, text link advertisers etc. Affiliate marketers who blog and bloggers in general seem to be more prone to this. After all it is very easy to add widgets to your wordpress blog. It's also enticing to be a member of every site offering a widget that will display your blogs visitors such as mybloglog.

I don't recommend using using these types of widgets. Especially not 3 or 4 and I think it's best to keep your ads hidden. Meaning hide your affiliate links using javascript. I think Google will penalize more site owners if all it looks like they are doing is promoting affiliate programs and that is how a lot of bloggers earn their money. That and via selling text links. Including a section titled “sponsors”, “text links” or “advertisers” is coming to an end, especially if the links are in an ordered list and have zero description. You need to remove any consistencies with your site that Google sees in other sites that seem to be trying to manipulate their SERPS. That also means removing your links pages or even link directories on your site.

If you've seen a loss or increase in Pagerank I'd love to hear about it. This site has stayed the same through the update.

Andy Beard wrote a good post about Pagerank you can read. He also talks about the recent Pagerank update and how it's upset a lot of people.