Google Hiroshima and Google Nagasaki

The first pagerank downgrade (let me call it Google’s PR “Hiroshima”) was for those sites involved with selling links which are mostly using Text Link Ads. A lot of sites get a 1 to 3 PR downgrades, however, in my tests and others also noticed it, the search engine ranking and traffic are not affected.

The second pr downgrade (let me call it Google’s PR “Nagasaki”) was for sites that are selling sponsored posts such as posts for Pay Per Post (PPP). This time, the PR were set to zero (PR0). There were even reports that others not involved with PPP were also hit. They did however mentioned PPP or “Pay Per Post” somewhere in their sites. So it seems that google’s algorithm are looking for those words in all our websites.

Despite these two “PR bombs”, ranking and traffic seems to be unaffected. Was it all a bluff? I did a test and it revealed some pretty surprising results.

Before I reveal to you the result of my test, let us first analyze why google is doing this.

Pagerank Technology Revisit

Google invented a unique and clever way to rank websites. In one of their presentation slides I saw somewhere, they are using about 200 factors for search engine ranking. However, their flagship technology is called PageRank or PR. PageRank became one of the most influential factor in search engine ranking (assuming you’ve done proper on-page SEO). Given 2 sites with the same page with only minor differences in content, the one with more inbound links and thus resulting in a higher pagerank will almost always be ranked higher.

PR juice became the cornerstone of black hat SEO resulting in a lot of spam linking. This resulted in the invention of the “nofollow” attribute.

Out of the 200 factors that contribute to the search engine ranking, why in the world did google choose to do PR downgrades and not just manipulate the other 199 factors? This is because I believe that PR is on top of the off-page seo criteria (probably in the top 3 for off-page seo).

Link Trading

Buying links really does improve your ranking! Period! I don’t say it is good or bad. I don’t say I’m for or againts it, but I recognize that buying/selling links is so important to merit a “google hiroshima” and “google nagasaki”.

In the market of link trading, the value of a link is tied to the PR. The higher the PageRank, the higher the price of a link. If google wants to control link selling, all they have to do is to control the PR. With a simple formula, PR0 = no value.

However, a lot of legitimate and influential websites with real valuable content were selling links. They were able to maintain a quality website because of their sponsors. These sites should remain high in the search engine results because of the quality of their content.

So google needs to find a way to make PR penalties without affecting the SERPs. And this is precisely what people are seeing today. A lot of websites got PR penalized but retained their rankings.

The big question is, if PageRank is so BIG of a factor in ranking, how come it doesn’t seem to affect the Search Engine Results? Could this be possible? How in the world google did it?

My theory - the PR BluffRank

Google has been vocal about the difference between the ongoing, consistently changing “true” PageRank, and the toolbar PR. What we see as the PageRank is actually a snapshot of the actual Pagerank in some point in time. So there are 2 “records” of a webpage’s PR. One which is being used by google’s search engine algorithm, and the other for the toolbar.

The only way I can think of that will results in a PR0 without affecting the SERPS is to change the toolbar PR without changing the “actual PR”, thus resulting in what I called a “BluffRank (BR)”.

With this strategy, the toolbar PR which is the basis for the value of links, can be set to PR0 and thus result into zero value for links. If buyers “perceive” a link as having no value, they won’t buy links. Its as simple as that. The question is, does the links from a PR downgraded website really has no value?

The PR juice test

Eversince I noticed that the SERPs were not affected, I have this feeling that the links in those PR downgraded sites are still passing PR juice. If my Bluffrank Theory is correct, then it will still pass PR juice even if its PR0.

So I did a test. I won’t be mentioning any URLs here but I’ll describe the scenario.

I have 3 websites.

A. Website with TLA. Previously PR6 now at PR0

B. Website without TLA but with PPP. Previously PR4 now at PR0

C. Website without TLA or PPP. Currently PR2

I made 3 test pages on a different domain. These 3 have almost identical webpages containing a certain keyword. I only changed some words on the content but I’ve kept the same number of words for each of the 3 test pages. (this is to avoid duplicate content penalty affecting the results).

I then created a sitewide link (just like what TLA customers do) from website A to test page 1, then website B to test page 2, and lastly website C to test page 3.

If those sites with PR0 are not passing link juice whatsoever, then test page 3 should be on top of test page 1 and 2.

I’ll update you as and when I get the results.

To be continued…..

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