My man on the inside has been telling me that Google is going around manually adjusting the PageRank on quite a few sites - and so far it’s all been going down!

The most noticeable bitch slaps so far have been:

• JohnChow.com - PR6 to PR5
• Statcounter.com - PR9 to PR8
• AndyBeard.eu - PR5 to PR4
• Stanford Daily - PR9 to PR7
• Entrepreneurs Journey - PR6 to PR5

Webmasters everywhere are up in arms that it is due to the selling of paid links and those of them who don’t actually sell links seem to have ignored the fact that Google sometimes decreases PR anyway and are claiming that Google has incorrectly labeled them as a link seller. Boo hoo…

Thank you Google

From my perspective, this is absolutely brilliant. Google is working hard to build the most accurate and reputable search engine available and eliminate the completely absurd and manipulated results that you get for searches like “make money online“.

I’m a “power user” of Google and getting the results that I want easier and faster will only save me time and money.

If you get slapped…you probably deserve it

What a lot of people seem to miss is that Google wants the most accurate results. If you suddenly find yourself slipping a few pages in the rankings, you probably didn’t deserve to have your great positioning in the first place. Look at the top #10 for “make money online” - most of them shouldn’t even rank in the top #100!

And for every webmaster who gets dropped - another more relevant one will rise!

Being thrown out of the Google index entirely is the extreme end of this and you have to really p*ss Google off for this to happen.

John Chow is the obvious example of this where he outlandishly exploited their system and now he doesn’t even rank for his own name - but that makes Google look bad!

If anybody does a search for JC on Google, they’re not going to be able to find him and that really hurts Google’s reputation as a quality resource. For them to take that damage, your actions must cause greater damage than the hit to their reputation from them not providing a relevant result.

Not all slaps are equal

With the slaps so far supposedly coming manually, it should be noted that any ranking decreases will not happen to everyone. There are many, many reputable online newspapers and companies who partake in the practice of buying and selling links and will definitely not have their rankings penalized.

The New York Times is a notable example where they are in the business of selling links from their pages - and they’re not “no follow” either - but can you ever imagine a situation where they are penalized and the NY Times homepage isn’t #1 in a search for “new york times”? Ain’t gonna happen!

PayPerPost and Text Link Ads must be sweating

Both PayPerPost and Text Link Ads rely very heavily on PR in setting their prices and generating increased income. With sites that sell their PR getting penalized, these companies are essentially losing their assets and they’re going to have to find a new system.

But consider this - if PPP actually sold posts based upon the amount of traffic that it generated, you’d have less advertisers complaining about “garbage posts” that didn’t bring them any customers and they’d probably be able to actually charge advertisers a higher price than they do now. The blogger, advertiser and PPP would all make more money.

Life’s sweet in an honest world.

I’ll still be selling

While it can’t be done for all sites, part of my money making strategy on CashQuests has never really involved Google. The traffic they’ve sent me has always been pathetic and realistically it isn’t the type of traffic that I desire. I’d trade 50 visitors from Google for 1 visitor that comes via a recommendation on another site.

All my link and paid review prices have also been determined based upon the amount of traffic that they will generate and not any PR. I admit that the fact CashQuests is currently PR0 has a lot to do with that but it simply means that if Google bitch slapped me tomorrow it would still be “situation normal”.

What me worry?

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