After being in the dark for more than a couple of months, the Pagerank Update has finally began taking place. Atleast, that is what I can deduce after noticing John Chow’s site today. Speculation has been rife in the Digital Point forums about the latest Pagerank Update. You can check your PR as its updating with the list of Top 7 places to check your live pagerank.

The Surprise

Also, the surprise here being that John Chow actually lost a PR on his blog seeing that it has gone down to four from five. The iWebtool Pagerank Prediction Tool, on which many webmasters seem to have had their eye on, also got its prediction wrong in case of John’s site. The tool clearly indicates that John Chow’s PR would go up to 6 and also displaying a backlink count of well over 25000. Then, where did it go wrong?

The Problem

Google, or atleast Matt Cutts, as far as I know has been clearly campaigning against the use of paid links on blogs and websites and has also recommended that people report paid links found on websites using the spam report form. Also taking into account the fact that John has extensive advertising on his site especially in the form of text links and banners which all fall under the paid advertising category, he shouldn’t be too surprised that the Pagerank has dropped on the site.

Of course, it is one of the biggest blogs on the web and that makes it just too easy to notice. On an approximate count, there are 16 text links and 8 banner links on the sidebar alone and it is quite evident that they are paid.

Does it affect John Chow?

A PR drop may be a momentary jolt for John, but rest assured that is not something I would worry about if I was John. The reason being that most advertisers pick the blog for the sheer amount of traffic it brings and not for the PR alone. Having an Alexa rank <2500 is certainly no mean achievement. Losing a single PR will most probably not affect the site in anyway, especially in terms of revenue. I’d love to hear John’s take on this.. This isn’t the first time that Google hates him though

How does it affect you?

For the average blogger however, this is a different story. The low traffic blogs try to sell text links based on their PageRank only. However, selling links may get you a rap from Google, leading to a drop in the PR. This means, you can’t command as much authority as before and your link sales may drop.

The average bloggers will be the most hit from this new strategy of Google. An alternate way to make money is certainly an option that such bloggers will have to explore, if they want to stand a chance of making money from their site without antagonising Google.

Have you had any impact on your PR with this update? And if the PR takes a beating, will it affect your income? Do give your opinions on this! Thanks for reading!

Edit:It seems that more than one top blog has taken a PR beating from Google and those include:

• Seroundtable.com
• Searchenginejournal.com
• Searchengineguide.com
• Problogger.net
• Copyblogger.com

Digital Point is really going nuts over this one!

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