Google PR Update over New Year 2009
I know that this one is quite late for me, but I’ve noticed PR updates lately. The PR update seemed to happened as the year turned 2009. This was confirmed by Google’s engineer Matt Cutts via Twitter.
I’ve checked my blogs and the blogs of other friends and bloggers that I know of. I am pleased that I got lots of friends who had their PRs. One funny thing in this round is that there are a lot of blogs with paid reviews that still retained or regained their Google PRs.
The Lady Programmer got back its PR. It was 3, then down to zero (because I did a lot of paid reviews) and then back to 3. It always helps to check old posts and retire those reviews with links that aren’t working anymore.
Google’s major change
This is indeed another big change in their Google PR algorithm. PR is just one little factor among the hundreds of factors that Google uses to rank websites and blogs in their importance in search engine results page. Ranking on the first page of Google translates to more traffic – and this can translate to more money.
Some people tried to figure out how to make their sites rank well at the first page of Google results. Before it was those keywords and the PR of the sites that hold those keywords. Of course, the engineers that work on Google’s algorithm had found out that there are people called SEO experts who always study how search engines work. Eventually, they made it well so that PR gets to be a part of the Google equation – not the main thing that really powers Google’s searches.
Paid links and reviews will die
Right now, paid reviews and paid links (that require dofollow) will still be an existing trade. But this trade will not last forever. Some sites like PPP had began offered SocialSpark as an alternative to do paid reviews with a “nofollow” tag so that blogs that do paid reviews don’t get penalized in leading search engines.
Google may hold the power over how their searches turn out, but SEO experts will still have jobs to do to figure out how search engines work – this time without that elusive PR factor.
