Matt Cutts Confirms PR Update For Paid Links

Search Engine Journal has a quote from an email from Matt Cutts on the latest PR update:

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

PR Updates For Selling Links

ProBlogger claims to have confirmation from sources at Google that the latest PageRank updates were directly related to penalizing sites for selling text links. He got hit, then submitted a reinclusion request and got his PR back after he could show that he had no paid links on his blog.

Got His PageRank Back By Asking

This is a new one, Joost de Valk got a PR hit, submitted a request for reconsideration, then Google gave him his PR back after he proved that he had no paid links on the site. (He's going to be a presenter at SMX Stockholm)

Search This

Do a Google search for the keywords; 'Search' or 'Search Engine'. Google doesn't make the first page.

Google PageRank Update, Pt. 2

More good links to articles from the last couple days. I am starting to become more convinced that the update is to devalue a combination of reciprocal linking networks and paid links.

I thought this one was really interesting, The Harvard Crimson, www.thecrimson.com PR8 > PR4:

Search Engine Land - list of sites hit and long list of other blog posts

Search Engine Roundtable - good overview

SEOMoz - similar list of sites, tons of comments

Google PageRank Update For October

It appears that Google has done a tool bar PR update. The majority of sites are seeing drops in PageRank with several very large websites being hit. Rumors are flying that it is related to paid links and sites are getting penalized. Looks to me like its bloggers getting hit...again. People with short memories, we saw the same thing happen a few months ago to the bloggers. Here are 2 updates:

Search Engine Roundtable

Search Engine Journal

This is probably the best update:
Andy Beard

Highlights:
copyblogger.com PR 6 > PR4
searchengineguide.com PR7 > PR4
searchenginejournal.com PR7 > PR4
seoroundtable.com PR7 > PR4
forbes.com PR7 > PR5

Open Source Keyword Generation Tool

Here's an open source keyword tool that pulls keywords from Google Suggest, Yahoo Live Search, and Yahoo Related Search. You can even scrape Google Trends on an hourly basis.

Google Death Ray

Global Search Report

This Global Search Report looks at about 20 countries and their search habits. I wish they had covered France and Germany as well.

Domain Stock Exchange

Interesting idea, a stock exchange for domain names; a way to sell or buy percentages of ownership in big domains. In public beta.

List Of Links For Google PageRank Drop

This is an appendix to the post I did over the weekend about Google lowering the PageRank of sites selling text links. As a recap, Google has admitted that they are targeting sites which sell links and lowering their PR to discourage paid links.

Danny Sullivan covered the story first and SearchEngineLand has an updated list of stories and posts related to the issue.

Berkeley Search Engine Class Video

Berkeley has their own YouTube channel where they post free class lectures. I found this video series from a Search Engines class. These are from 2005 but looks like there is some good material, including one of the lecture given by Brin.

Viral Linkbait

A new online dating startup called Just Say Hi was founded by a young guy named Matt Inman(former employee of SEO Moz). He used a new domain and built up a powerful search presence in an amaxingly short amount of time. He is ranking on the first page for 'free online dating'. I just read a good interview with Matt at Search Marketing Standard.

His strategy was brilliant. He created a great collection of widgets and badges, then directed all the juice from them and the pages they resided on to his homepage with targeted text. Viola, within 3 months he had thousands of relevant links.

User Generated Content

Build it and they will come is not always the case. Vanessa Fax writes a decent post about launching a user generated component on your site. Shes got a couple of really great ideas:

• Seed the content before you launch
• Invite targeted users to seed that content and test the platform
• Reward contributors
• Good oversight to moderate quality
• Use a focused approach
• Make the experience as engaging as possible for users
  

SEOMoz Outing Sites For Selling Links

This is not the first time that SEO Moz was tattling on sites who purchase or sell text links, but finally someone did a full post on Rand's latest outing post. Kudos to SEO Refugee for bringing SEO Moz to task for blatantly targeting sites selling links.

Rand throws up these posts in his words, 'to make a point', yet fails to consider the implications. There is no question that Googlers including Cutts read SEO Moz. I would also say that there is pretty good evidence that any passing mention in forums or widely read blogs of any specific activity that is against Google's Guidelines is manually acted upon by Google in the form of filtering or penalties.

I think it is irresponsible for MOZ to write a post where he actually points the finger at specific sites by listing their URLs.

Matt Cutts Interview

Stone Temple always does very detailed and intelligent interviews which are worth checking out. He recently interviewed Matt Cutts. The first half of the interview is spent on Nofollows and Noindex. The last half is spent on hidden text since Google has recently refined their guidelines there and paid links.

Google Dropping PageRank Of Link Sellers

I've been shying away from commenting much on the entire paid link hoopla. There have been countless post of sites that are worried they have been penalized for paid links, buying or selling, only to be proven wrong.

Well, Danny at Search Engine Land is now saying that Google is manually lowering the PageRank of sites selling links and Google has confirmed that. Danny points to the Stanford Student Newspaper(which he previously mentioned in a post), where they went from a PR 9 to a PR 7.

Interesting approach, this way it doesnt hurt relevancy in the engine, just lowers the incentive for people to buy links from a particular site. Check out the article, he points to a few other examples.

SEOBook Changes URL Re-Write

I noticed that Aaron Wall's site was down for a bit yesterday. Today I noticed that his post URL's look a bit different.

Latest Post: http://www.seobook.com/major-relevancy-changes-google-yahoo-and-msn

Older Post: http://www.seobook.com/archives/002265.shtml

I always wondered why he used those rough looking URL's. The new ones look great.

Changes Across All Search Engines

Unless you've had your head in the sand, there have been some dramatic changes in the 3 majors:

• MSN-Major Algorithm change and platform update; expansion of index from 5 Bill to 20 Bill. pages.
• Yahoo-Algo update, interface update, and the introduction of universal search, pushing their own properties
  
• Google-Major shifts on single word queries, indexed pages, huge diecrepencies between their test engine and Google.com, and weird things going on at specific Data Centers.

Overall, everything seems for the better. Aaron Wall of SEOBook gives a good overview as well.