SEO CheckList

In my last post, I reported about the PageRank roller coaster. Popular and high-profile web sites went from being in the upper echelon of the PageRank hierarchy to the bottom half. Within a few days, however, many web sites saw their PageRanks restored to their previous glory, or at least saw their diminished PageRanks climb up the ladder again. I presented three possibilities of why this happened: Selling (text) links, Google algorithm change and WidgetBucks. Well, now you can scrap the other two because the cause for everything that’s happened is confirmed to be paid text links.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal reports that popular Google personality, Matt Cutts, emailed them proclaiming that the fluctuations in PageRank all around the web recently has been due to web sites selling text links.

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

Google has always had explicitly stated in their guidelines that they were against selling of text links. However, because they haven’t taken a proactive stance to penalize those who do chose to sell text links, web sites cared little for the guidelines and sold text links anyhow. This time, however, Google has finally waged war against web sites selling text links. As of now, there is still no news on what could redeem the “PageDunked” web sites.

What will people do after this? Will they completely let go of selling text link advertisements to be in Google’s favor or do they, “screw it” and go on with selling links? It all remains to be seen.