Yes, Google has “cutted” my PageRank too!
Like a lot of other weblogs this “Web Development Blog” has lost today 2 points in PageRank (went from 5 to 3). A week ago I had the idea that this blog will get a PR6 based on the information I got via the Google webmaster tools. After reading about PR drops from Andy Beard, Tim Nash, Darren Rowse and several others I noticed that all of them (including me) thought the reason could be some link sales. So maybe all of us tried to sell a link some time ago?
Text Link Ads
I think most of all websites with content for webmasters link to this website because they pay $money for referrals and I saw a lot of high quality blogs on their “Link Market Place”. Maybe is the affiliation with TLA is the reason for lot of this PR drops. TLA has a PR zero since several weeks and was maybe one of the first sites getting a PR drop (edit: they got a penalty from Google, you can’t find them on their company name). I remember me that TLA has send us new affiliate links using a TinyURL; some action to safe what was left? I removed my website from the TLA market place because I never earned something and also the prices from my TLA competitors are so high that I can’t believe that there are a lot of people making the “big” money there. I know some webdev site with a PR6 (or 7) was selling links for several hundred $ a month, this website has a PR 4 now.
I think Google has indexed the whole TLA market place and will change the PageRank for the listed sites now or later. Maybe is the affiliation with TLA already enough to loose PageRank points (who knows).
Victim or offender?
For those who sold links in a large scale like some paid directories I understand that Google has give a penalty to those sites, but what about those site from blog owners never sold (active) a link? In the past a high PageRank was a kind of compliment from Google to the owner thats he has done a good job in SEO. Today I need to think about every link placement if it’s maybe bad for my website.
Is this how we need to work in the future doing the work for search engines because some logarithms doesn’t work for 100%?
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Comments
Hi Giorgos,
yes you’re right they have a PR7, while I remember me that this was zero some time before (maybe I’m wrong). But they get a penalty because they are a link broker and no one can find them if people search for the company name.
(I hope this drop temporary) 
I got axed too… never mind, I will start using ask.com from now on… new features and better results!
PR counts for nothing. Measure success based on hits for what you wish to be found for. 1 way I often measure success is to research how many persons are subscribed to my RSS feeds. I consider 200 subscribed persons who will return far greater than 2000 who will only view the homepage.
It looks like the update is done, this block has got one point back but didn’t lost organic traffic.
It look like that Google has reached the webmasters attention again
Yes I have seen a lot of sites lose PR in the last week, a lot hae fallen from PR3 to PR2, and I have seen one drop from PR4 to PR2.
My relatively new website seems to have been unaffected at PR3 – perhaps because of the strength of the few links I have sent to it?
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Olaf, text-link-ads.com has a PR of 7 though, just checked it but, definitely they can’t be found even when looking for “text link ads”
Maybe you PR drop is something temporary ?