What could have happened that your PR dropped?

From an SEO perspective, it may be very important to take note of the new changes in the algorithm and the page rank degradation which has become the most significant now. Many or all of the page rank degradation reported have been the result of Google misunderstanding your site. Like Darren’s Problogger degrading to a PR 4, which have not sold any text link in the near future.

Let’s find out what could’ve happened.

• Use of Labels
  Many popular sites thought that Google will find the purchased links if they will use labels like “Sponsored links” and “Text link ads” hence they turned to less “findable” labels like “Cool Links and “Resources”.
  Truth is that, Matt Cutts and Google were already aware that text link brokers recommend buyers to mask their links using non-recognizable labels like “Cool Links” and “Suggested Links”.
  Probably Google included both “sponsored links” as well as “Cool Links” to their filter list.
• Inclusion in the Text-link-ads network and active participation in it.
  Google might have thought, instead of crawling a site and then deciding whether this guy is selling links or not, why don’t I go to the market and get hold of all the sellers there (A nice place is Text-link-ads).
• Use of texts like - Buy links here, Place your ad here, Text links at US $X, in your copy/template would have given Google crawlers a clear indication that you are selling links, while you may not have actually.
• Articles or posts that talked about “purchasing links” and “importance of Google page rank”.
• Actively taking part in Paid Reviews and encouraging users to order it.
• Selling other forms of advertisement on the blog
  Google might have assumed that,if someone is willing to sell image ads on his blog, then he’s also likely to sell text links.

All the above are assumptions on the Google crawlers thinking, keeping in mind they are pretty new to this area - to find out who exactly is guilty of selling links from their sites. My guess is that Google thought of all possible ways to get hold of the “culprits” and just went about catching anyone it found on the way who were likely to sell links on their sites.

But Matt had already warned us right? There could’ve been some precautions taken by those active link sellers. Let’s see what could’ve been done to stop Google misunderstanding you.

• Could’ve totally quit link buying and purchasing.
• Could’ve added the “no follow” tag to all outgoing links.
• Could’ve taken off the “provocative” labels like “Sponsored links”
• Could’ve reported to Google about what you’ve done.
• Could’ve sold more editorial links (like reviews) rather than odd-looking short text links.
• Could’ve refrained from writing non contextual articles linking to un-related sites.

Well, now that Google has taken the drastic step, there is very little that we can do. But Matt and his team needs to device more clear and precise strategies to find out who actually are buying links, who were buying links and who doesn’t buy links any more. What’s happening now isn’t fair at all.

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