Google’s Created Monster - PageRank Debacle

There’s been a whole range of comments from the SEO community regarding Google’s reduction of PageRank across the web.

For my money Google should practice what it preaches when it tells website owners that honesty about ones site and reporting of paid links should be adopted.

Here are some points to think over…

1. Google created the PageRank monster which has spawned a whole industry.  They should be the ones fixing it by eliminating Pagerank all together.

 2. If websites wish to sell link advertising to gain revenue it has nothing to do with search engines. Website owners should not have to modify their websites using nofollow tags because Google made a mistake creating pagerank.

3. Google created the nofollow tag to prevent comment spam on blogs, or so they say. Far from being a success, the nofollow tag on blogs has failed miserably.

Since that time Matt Cutts has told us many times and in detail where and how the nofollow tag should be used on normal websites.

“The rel=”nofollow” attribute is an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link. The best-known use for nofollow is blog comment spam, but the mechanism is completely general.”

So why was the nofollow tag really created is my question?

Google couldn’t tell how PR was directed when java was being used on links so did they create the nofollow so they could easily view how PR was being manipulated?

Site owners are now being told to use it on their paid text links.

So considering how quick Google was to suggest using the tag on normal sites, I have to really wonder about it’s intened purpose in the first place.

4. Jill Whalen’s attack on search engine guide and their paid links was pretty piss poor.

She clearly did no home work before posting her comments and was looking at the links purely from an SEO perspective rather than a wholistic business and marketing perspective.

The second point being that businesses will make link purchases based on their own assumptions and beliefs. Who are we to be their keepers as Jill thinks we should.

It was so bad that the owner of searchengineguide.com, Robert Cough had to post this detailed retort and response.

Just how many people Google have annoyed is yet to be seen however there are already many negaitive reponses regarding their actions by well known figures such as Andy Beard umong others.

So what does it all boil down to?

Google created the Pagerank industry and now they are telling us what to do with our websites because of their mistakes.

If they wish to rank sites lower due to link sales, they should come up with algorithm that tells which sites are doing it to genuinelly make revenue for those links or which sites are selling links on the basis of pagerank.

What they should not be doing us is telling us how we should design our sites because of their mistakes.