While browsing sites that I manage and have managed in the past, I noticed a little bit of Green in my toolbar that wasn’t meant to be there.
Back last year, Google removed the PageRank numbers off sites that they suspected were selling links. They were cracking down on people who were manipulating search results by buying links to boost their rankings artificially. This pissed a lot of people off, as you can see over with Andy Beard.
Anyway 3GN Media, a site I ran with Yaro Starak, was slapped for selling links last year. However on a second glance today, it’s back up to a PR3 on the homepage — and we’re STILL selling links! Hmmmm…
Why Do We Have Our Page Rank Back?
I have two theories about this and we have had a lot of changing circumstances which may have affected the situation. Here’s what I think:
- Change of Ownership
- Addition of a Blog Frontpage
Change of Ownership
Back in January, Yaro decided to sell all of his sites - 3GN Media was one of them. Selling the site obviously changes the ownership of the site around to another person.
Addition of Blog Frontpage
Initially we had no frontpage for 3GN Media. It was an empty directory besides a lonely .htaccess file which redirected people to the “/forums” sub-directory. After we got slapped by Google last year we setup the blog as a Frontpage and still sold links on the site.
My guess is that it either snuck past Google’s hard-hitting palm, or it’s got enough links going to it, that even with being penalised, it warrants a PR 3.
What Do You Think?
Open up in the comments… This has me confused still.
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Posted by Robert Kingston on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 8:16 pm. Category: Miscellaneous. Comment Feed: RSS 2.0. Leave a Comment below, or a trackback from your site.
I think google looks for patterns on sites to look for sites with are over using paid linking by taking common characteristics of those sites.
Their embargo on paid links also coincided with a drop in their advertising revenue.
Jack
March 10th, 2008
Yeah, that’s a typically Googlesque strategy. Developing solutions to problems which can be scaled up and applied to their indexing and ranking.
Everyone says it’s to increase their revenue on AdWords but I think the main motivation was based around improving relevancy and quality of the results. I’ve noticed that when searching competitive keywords (i.e. in industries likely to benefit from and pay for SEO), Google often deliver poor results.
Robert Kingston
March 16th, 2008
Google does take into account DNS settings, so if they changed the site may have got a clean slate. Nice little find!
Rob
April 12th, 2008