More Pinoy sites lose PageRank as Google updates… again
Boy, and we thought the Google PageRank (PR) update was over.
I’ve gone bloghopping today and noticed through my Google Toolbar that some of the sites I frequent have dropped PR. Nope, this was not the same PageRank update in late October that saw a lot of sites got penalized. When I checked the PR of those sites in October 30, it showed a different (read: higher) PR. Now, the latest update has got the following Philippine sites affected.
New list of Philippine sites with reduced PageRank (checked November 8)
| Website | Original PR | PR as of Oct. 25 | PR as of Nov. 8 |
|---|---|---|---|
| pinoytravelblog.com | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| seophilippines.org | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| rickey.org | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| jrocas.com.ph | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| jepoyeng.blogspot.com | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| macalua.com | 5 | 5 | 3 |
| quezon.ph | 5 | 5 | 3 |
| jaypeeonline.net | 5 | 5 | 3 |
| man-blog.com | 5 | 5 | 3 |
| pinoytechblog.com | 5 | 4 | 3 |
| pinoycook.net | 4 | 4 | 3 |
Original list of Philippine sites that got penalized (updated November 8)
| Website | Original PR | PR as of Oct. 25 | PR as of Nov. 8 |
|---|---|---|---|
| inquirer.net | 6 | 4 | 6 |
| manilatimes.net | 6 | 4 | 4 |
| philstar.com | 6 | 4 | 5 |
| yugatech.com | 5 | 3 | 3 |
| jozzua.com | 5 | 3 | 3 |
| aboutmyrecovery.com | 5 | 3 | 3 |
| retzwerx.com | 5 | 3 | 3 |
| pinoymoneytalk.com | 4 | 2 | 3 |
* PageRank checked using Live PR Tool and PageRank Checker.
** Oct. 25 PR of some sites based on Michael’s Pinoy Blogs’ PR One Year Later post.
Most SEO specialists now agree that paid links are the culprit for the Google PR drop. Google employee Matt Cutts also confirmed this in October.
Prior to the recent PageRank downgrade, webmasters consistently bragged about their site’s PR. Interestingly, the affected ones have now started evangelizing how unimportant Google PR has become.
* These ads open in a new window. *
True, as long as the decreased PR does not affect a site’s traffic, then that site is fine. This, however, normally applies only to sites that are already established, sites where visitors need not use a search engine anymore to come to the site.
But for the dominant majority whose traffic still relies on results of Google search, a drop in PR may lead to a drop in the search results ranking which could lead to a drop in visitors. These sites are the ones affected heavily by the PR downgrade.
As of this writing, I have yet to read a blog post about a site losing traffic because of a drop in Google PR. Either that is not really happening or the blogger is just too shy to admit that it is.
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March 17th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
how can we get back lost PR? help
November 25th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Grace, a site’s Google PR fluctuates especially during PR update time. In any case, don’t focus too much on the PR. Just continue building traffic to your site and continue to generate income from it. Higher site earnings is definitely better than higher PR, right?
November 15th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Hello. My page rank in http://trialsofmylife.bravejournal.com degraded to PR0 before it was 3 then degraded to 2 and then it become PR0 :(
November 13th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Biske, yan exactly yung pinagtatalunan namin sa forum since 2006 pa. Look at the discussion on the issue: Content issues for site publishers. The supposed solution is for Google to migrate from using PageRank to TrustRank in ranking websites. But how that will work, I don’t know.
geri, I think Google is selectively penalizing some sites, that’s why there are those who still has TLA and has paid links but the PR did not drop. Or the reason can also be most of the sites that link to you lost PR which eventually pulled down your site’s PR. Since Google has no official statement regarding this, we can only make a guess.
jhay, seriously? That’s the first time I heard of a direct relation between a drop in PR and a drop in traffic. Did your ad earnings decrease as well alongside the drop in traffic?
True, Google does play God at times. Unfortunately, as long as our sites rely mostly on Google search results for traffic, we cannot but succumb to Google’s whims.