Valleywag
They call Google's Web search results "organic" for a reason. Why? There's a lot of manure in there. In fact, there's a whole industry dedicated to helping webmasters redesign their pages for Google's PageRank algorithm. But to Google's taste, some search engine optimization, or SEO, goes too far. Google has a particular distaste for popular websites that accept money in exchange for linking to less popular websites in order to boost the latter's search ranking. Google's beancounter, naturally, would prefer that you pay Google for sponsored links instead. Now comes a report that Google might be punishing websites that accept paid links. Most disturbingly, several of them are popular blogs that cover the business of blogging and search engines — the very sites most likely to cover this news. Is Google, even inadvertently, suppressing its critics? Here are the most notable companies on Google's hit list.
Suspected linkwhores and their new Google PageRanks (PR), compiled by Search Engine Land:
- The Washington Post PR7 to PR5
- Forbes PR7 to PR5
- Chicago Sun-Times PR7 to PR5
- San Francisco Chronicle PR7 to PR5
- Autoblog PR6 to PR4
- Engadget PR7 to PR5
- ProBlogger PR6 to PR4
- Copyblogger PR6 to PR4
- Joystiq PR6 to PR4
- TUAW PR6 to PR4
- Search Engine Journal PR7 to PR4
- Search Engine Roundtable PR7 to PR4
- The Blog Herald PR6 to PR4
(Disclosure: Autoblog, Engadget, and Joystiq compete directly with blogs owned by Gawker Media, the publisher of Valleywag.)
Comments
How have Gawker sites been affected? Thankfully you guys ditched the internal links that appeared on every fifth word.
its about time.
@WillClark: As far as I can tell, no sites owned by Gawker Media were on the list. And yes, I find I like our site better without the inline tag links. I do like using internal links, though, when they're helpful to readers to point to past coverage -- if you ever find that practice excessive, let me know.
Google = Evil 2.0
Good riddance for some of these - look at Forbe's website; looks like a drunk ad executive who'd gone to one-too-many AdTech parties barfed ads all over their site in wierd places. Uck. For me looks like the PR is a 4 not a 5 -- well-deserved it should be less.
A good chunk of the whiners are people who only blog abut linking & page rank, so I don't really blame google for demoting them. For instance I think it is fucking hilarious that JohnChow.com got knocked down the ladder!
Now for blog networks, I think that is pretty lame. From what I read the Gawker sites haven't been hit because they're not insane about linking.
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