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Google PR de-rankings, reality check for many bloggers

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All these Google PR updates and de-rankings, and Google’s war on text link sellers have been an interesting occurrence on the web. Google started with one objective, that is to fight (eliminate) PR chasers and punish those who sell PageRanks. But the whole situation had many different outcomes. One of these outcomes is the reality check for many medium sized blogs.

Punishments… more punishments

First Google de-ranked many blogs (including mine) for selling text links (and banners) which didn’t use “nofollow” tags. It also punished all those who use Text-Link-Ads.com and other well known programs that offer text selling services. Then it furthered its fight and showed that it has no intention of slowing down, so few days back, it gave many blogs “zero” PageRanks.

The result was quite devastating to many bloggers. Because it either meant, no traffic from Google or no PageRank (or less PR) but still have some money through selling links. But if the advertisers were buying links from you just because you had high PR, then now you were in trouble. For these bloggers, there was only one choice, to surrender to Google. This meant, almost zero profit but have a shiny Google friendly blog (what’s the point?). But I guess that’s the only choice.

Therefore, content is still the King. Because if you provide quality content, readers will still be coming to your blog. For them, it does not matter if you have zero in your pagerank toolbar, they will still be reading your blog. Only thing you need to keep writing useful articles.

Reality Check

I have never seen SitePoint marketplace being filled with this many blogs up for sale like now. Since Google started punishing blogs, more and more blogs are beings sold. Latest blog joining the ranks of “blogs for sale” is the blog of Kumiko - CashQuests.com.

Her popular, often controversial blog is too up for sale at SitePoint Marketplace at the moment. Highest bid stands at $15,000, with two bids so far.

But it’s strange that she has not published about the blog sale at her blog. Maybe she wants to keep it secret from the readers, till the blog sale is completed. But I personally think that informing the readers about the sale would have been a better decision. Because readers are the ones who know your blog best, and they could actually be the potential buyers. Also, they could help to spread the word about the sale.

What future holds?

I think Google won’t stop their War On Terror-links in the near future. That said, it will have more affects on the blogosphere. More and more blogs (in the make money online category) will be sold off, closed down, or will be inactive. This means the gap between probloggers and beginner bloggers will widen. Most of the bloggers who are in the middle will decrease in size, over time successful ones will join the ranks of probloggers. And not so successful ones, won’t survive the big tide of Google-tsunami.

This will also create other alternative ways to rank sites. In fact, this is already in process. Izea is in the process of launching RealRank.

RealRank will rank the sites based on three things:

1. 70% weighted towards visitors per day
2. 20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
3. 10% weighted towards pageviews per day

Google’s competitive advantage

But Google has an advantage over every single tool that will be created in the future. That advantage is its Search Engine. Izea might rank your site differently, most probably higher than your current pagerank. But it won’t be able to give you higher position on Google’s search engine result pages. And that would make the RealRank quite useless.

So if you rely on Google’s traffic, then you have no choice but to surrender to Google’s demands. And the better decision would be to make it sooner than later. Because you never know what will be Google’s next step on its War On Text-links.

Obviously, this will further increase Google’s power in the future. That means you can expect more rules and regulations from Google. I just hope Google won’t follow the steps of Pharaoh and start claiming to be the god of internet.

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