The Wholesale Forums

[harrychoochoo]

I've just read an interesting article and thought I'd share.

http://www.googlelady.com/500/google-rumor...pagerank-reset/

Changes include:

PageRank to be reset to zero and replaced:

The infamous PageRank (PR) is going to be no more. All toolbar PR data will be reset to zero and PR will never be coming back (this is why we have been waiting so long for the update). This is very bad news for anyone who sells text links in order to make money.

This will be done in time for a mid November release of the Google Toolbar version 4.2 which will be used to roll out “VR” (visitor rating). Google VR™ will use a digg like system with a voting button on the toolbar to collect visitor ratings of the page and the VR will be displayed via a blue bar similar to the PR bar. The VR value will be based on a number of factors like the ratio between visitors and votes and where your visitors come from (i.e referred from a site or a search engine), It will also take in to account how many people return to your site over time. I was assured that measures will be in place to stop competition rigging your VR by giving you too many negative votes.

Two clicks for AdSense

Google are bringing in a system designed to prevent someone clicking on an advert unless they actually want to. The system they are implementing will mean when someone clicks on your AdSense ads a box will appear telling them that the link they just clicked is a PPC advert and it will ask them if they want to visit the sponsored link. if they click “yes” you get paid, If they click “No” you don’t get paid. It is speculated that this will reduce all AdSense earnings by 75% across the board but will increase the CPC.

rel=”nofollow” replaced by rel=”dofollow”

.....Google are replacing it with a rel=”dofollow” attribute which will tell the Google bot what links you DO want it to follow. It will simply ignore all links with no attribute or the rel=”nofollow” attribute, it will only crawl rel=”dofollow” links. All links you have earned up to this point are now worthless.

http://www.googlelady.com/500/google-rumor...pagerank-reset/

I imagine there will be many different opinions on whether these changes are good or bad. Personally, I hope they do happen. Webmasters will be rewarded for quality content rather than their ability to 'play' the search engines. As one person said in the comments thread, it will be like a breath of fresh air.

Any thoughts?

[Kay]

Interesting, Harry. I also read recently that Google are now penalising sites which buy and/or sell links. Several major sites have already had their PR drastically reduced. Here's an example:

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-changi...rank-algorithm/

Personally, I'm not bothered, as we've always run content-based sites and I'd welcome Google rewarding good content over the other stuff.

As for the other issue - the nofollow or dofollow - I'm not much bothered about that either. Again, I'd like to see quality content win the day. I'm all for it!

They're pretty major changes, though. It'll be very interesting to see the effects. Thanks for sharing the info.

[Big Phil]

Interesting stuff. I'm not sure how I'd feel about the possible Adsense changes if I still making a decent amount of money from them.

I had a conversation with a guy earlier this week who was wanting to me to work for him. He owns an online directory and was wanting to have somebody contact businesses for him and sell them directory listings. I turned it down for several reasons as the entire conversation left me feeling very uneasy.

Anyway, during the conversation, in which it became apparent that the guy had very little idea of how keywords and SEO worked, the subject of pagerank came up. He seemed quite proud of the fact he had worked his way to a PR3. He asked me what I thought about that, and my reply was along the lines of, "unless I'm selling text links, I don't think it really matters." He response to that was quite bizarre, as good as rubbishing my opinion, and saying that his ranking proved that Google "trusts" his website.

I've done ok in the past from selling text links. A few years ago, I did think PR was of some importance. The more I read about it though, the less important it became. Its handy to sell text links, and that's about it, in my opinion.

As Kay said, rewarding good content is the main thing.