PR devaluation affects many?

[virtualtraveller]

After the most recent PR update (july) it appears that a lot of sites lost 1 PR point, even this site it seems. What were PR6s are now down to 5, and all my own sites which were each a solid 5 and have been for 2 years dropped to 4, despite persistant and measured link attraction.

This may have been previously discussed and I've missed it but I'm looking for comments and answers. Although it hasn't had a noticeable affect on visitors or income I certainly have fallen in SERPs for my keywords, sometimes 10 places or more, but mostly just a few.

It seems like an attempt by google to eliminate PR boost from single sources (ie if you have PR6 resulting from only a single PR7 link, rather than lots of other PR6 and PR5 sites, you will be devalued). Therefore the algo has shifted in favour of lots of medium PR links rather than a few high PR links.

For more than a year now I have seen the algo reverting to the strength of the homepage PR, so that a single deep page inside lonely planet's site will usually rank better than a site with higher PR and hundreds more relevant pages.

I'm also curious about PR dilution, ie the net total of value of all your links divided by total of links, so that lots of links on PR1 or PR2 pages deep down in decent directories are perhaps a disadvantage. Over the past year we have listed with more than 700 directories but I haven't seen much change in either PR or serps.

Much that we all like to dismiss PR as irrelevant, I still see correlations between high PR and results.

More than ever I'm convinced that age (of site and links) is far more weighted than anything else.

Comments?

[SemAdvance]

Seems your sites and others got smacked around for heavy reciprocal linking.

Webmaster Help Center - Link schemes

It's now added to the list of link schemes by Google.

I've been trying to explain to people that these things are useless for a few years now

Links: Why They are of Little Value in Helping to Achieve Front Page Google Results

It's odd though that Google is taking this stance now at such a late stage in the game.

Good luck to you you!

[billybw]

A natural pattern of backlinks to a site would include mostly PR0 and PR1 links, with only a few higher PR links. That is what would happen naturally.

So if your site has a different structure of backlinks, for instance too top-heavy, or everything depending on one or two high PR links, that's an un-natural pattern, and indicates artificial manipulation. So Google might penalize or downgrade the site for this reason.

[martty]

Originally Posted by billybw

So if your site has a different structure of backlinks, for instance too top-heavy, or everything depending on one or two high PR links, that's an un-natural pattern, and indicates artificial manipulation.

How do you know that is the case?

[tomcatuk]

Er, not aware a PR update occurred in July at all. Most of the usual threads talking about PR seem to think an update will happen at the end of this month, or did I totally miss it?

[aaron2005]

Be careful not to rely on "natural" linking to a "white hat" extreme. I did this and watched my content drop off into the supplemental index before they removed that label.

Have a reciprocal link directory or page on your website? Remove is quick or risk a ban. Google is very careful who they share their pagerank with these days...

I got a PR7 site that barely has enough fuel to stay out of supplementals if you follow me. It's "top heavy" as billybw mentioned. ;-(

[dann]

Originally Posted by aaron2005

Have a reciprocal link directory or page on your website? Remove is quick or risk a ban. Google is very careful who they share their pagerank with these days...

I don't agree with this entirely, I don't have a recip "directory". But I do have two recip pages with only high quality sites that compliment my site's theme, both have PR and get me quite a few hits from Google. I do not link to sites though that have link directories(hundreds or thousands of pages) with exactly one hundred links on each page, jumbled together or neatly organized.
It's not a Google sin to have a few reciprocal links as long as it's not absurdly abused IMO.
Dan

[dann]

Replying to myself?
I have a theory as to why TBPR has pretty much dropped across the board lately.
As the WWW grows in leaps and bounds this must have an effect on how page rank is calculated, I don't think anyone has a clue really though except for Google.
I administer quite a few websites in totally different fields using basically the same SEO techniques and the pattern I have seen is the ecommerce sites got hit the hardest. This could be due to growth or...... conspiracy theories abound.
I really doubt that it all revolves around linking patterns though.

[tomcatuk]

I've heard it said, but not substantiated that PR degrades over time as the Google index gets bigger. I can't see why that would be though - PR isn't subject to any size limitation. It just gets bigger as more pages make their way into the index. More likely as the web gets bigger, Google is forced to increase the page weight required to get a given figure though so a PR10 page (DMOZ for example) drops not because it has lost any of the relevance it already has, it's just not GAINING relevance compared to other sites.

[khurramali]

could be that most of directories / incoming links websites had their power to transfer PR taken away because of selling links etc.

and i agree with TOMCATUK