It appears that overnight Google has changed how PageRank ranks sites, several very high profile web sites have been affected by this change and lost 2-3 rankings. The speculation is it is directly caused by web sites having paid links either to bad neighborhoods or just having them at all. It seems like Google is going head-strong into a shift towards ranking web sites poorly depending on where they link and if it is paid or not. I have compiled a list from various sources about the high-profile sites that have lost significant ranking.

This move is furthering the shift that a lot of people have been seeing away from not only PageRank, but possible away from Google for everything. Some sites have lost so much ranking they don’t even show up for their names, such as John Chow.

A list of web site that have lost PageRank

• Forbes has gone from a PR7 to a PR5
• SF Gate has gone from a PR7 to a PR5
• Autoblog has gone from a PR6 to a PR4
• Engadget has gone from a PR7 to a PR5
• Problogger has gone from a PR6 to a PR4
• Andy Beard has gone from a PR5 to a PR3
• Copyblogger has gone from a PR6 to a PR4
• Washington Post has gone from a PR7 to a PR5
• Seo Round Table has gone from a PR7 to a PR4
• Space.com has gone from a PR7 to a PR5
• NewScientist.com has gone from a PR7 to a PR5

All of these sites have lost PageRank, but according to reports none of them have really lost any traffic which may be the saving grace coming from Google. So it comes down to trying to figure out if it is inter-linking between networks like b5media does (see: ProBlogger) or if it is the selling/buying of text link ads and other similar advertising and not adding a nofollow link to them.

The plot thickens within the blogosphere

Recently David Airey lost a lot of traffic for a very similar cause and once he had added nofollow to his outgoing links he was able to recapture that traffic in Google once he had resubmitted his site to Google through Webmaster Central.

So right now the web community is trying to discover if it was a full algo change or just an adjustment of the Pagerank metrics. Currently everyone, including myself, is almost in full agreement that it is just a metric change for what qualifies you to have a certain PageRank for your site.

Should we not have sites link back to us as service providers?

Another interesting development is Sitemeter has completely lost pagerank, going from supposedly a PageRank of 10 to a PageRank of 0. This is the most shocking of all, it implies that it is about the network. So the PageRank looks to have discounted SiteMeter entirely due to their 33,200,000 links (from Yahoo).

This is a silly way to account for PageRank and a major drop for such a large web site. However, it does put things into perspective, the web design firm that I work for professionally put links at the bottom of all of their client’s pages linking back to our site. Does this mean that our site could possibly get discounted to 0 also when Google adjusts our PageRank? We are all crossing our fingers and hoping that this isn’t the case.

Lets put Google’s PR department on a milk carton

Google really needs to come out in the open with some of these major changes to help webmaster understand what they are basing all of this stuff on. It could Majorly effect a business such as our for not ranking well for web design in our state.

I’ll post more information as soon as it comes available, hopefully Google will come out with some kind of press release or we see Matt Cutts talk about it on his blog. Oh well, the Google SEO dance goes on.

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