Wow… Google’s new update the last couple of weeks has certainly been the most retarded thing I have ever witnessed come out of this company. What did they just do?! Almost every major site I know about has just had their site’s Page Rank reduced to ashes! As of right now, Pixel2life.com has just went from a 6 to a 4! This means that P2L has a lower PR than my blog, and any of my hobby sites. Are these guys out of their minds?? Check out my PR status on their various Google DCs:

This was generated at livepr.raketforskning.com

Now I’ve been reading all kinds of topics and articles on this and I can honestly say that the webmaster community in general is in complete shock over this, not to mentioned completely baffled. We’ve been seeing word that sites with heavy paid links have been penalized, but that’s a load of crapola… Of the 3 main tutorial portals out there, I am the only one that lost PR and the other 2 all have link exchanges and paid text links so I’m not buying that excuse for a minute. Then we have sites with absolutely NO text links of any kind that were hammered. 9Rules.com has been reduced to a PR 4 and these guys were a 7 or 8 at least!

Check out some of these articles for more information and comments on this utter bullsh*t:

First, you can read about what exactly PR is at smashingmagazine.com (The ironic part is that these guys went from a PR 7 to a 4!).

And now articles about this worthless update:

Sitepoint.com Here’s a snippet but go here to read the rest.

Boing Boing: Was 9, now 7.
Engadget: Was 7, now 5.
Forbes.com: Was 7, now 5.
New Scientist: Was 7, now 5.

There is a MASSIVE article with tons of updates and comments going at andybeard.eu (Give the page a bit to load, it hammered) Here’s a snippet but go here to read the rest.

Slapped By Google

For a company such as Google with a stock price based extensively on anticipated growth and public sentiment, it doesn’t take a huge swing in goodwill to have a dramatic effect on valuation. Google has just slapped their biggest fans.

After the very controversial hit many sites took just 2 weeks ago for various degrees of selling PageRank or linking to clients, you might have thought Google would take a breather, but Google it seems hadn’t even started its crackdown.

A number of sites have been hit yet again, including this one, but there is also a new element that has been introduced.

Here are some unusual penalties for trusted sources of good content

http://www.autoblog.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.engadget.com/ PR7 PR5
http://www.problogger.net/ PR6 PR4
http://www.copyblogger.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.joystiq.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.tuaw.com/ PR6 PR4

A few search and money related sites as examples

http://www.searchengineguide.com PR7 PR4
http://www.searchenginejournal.com PR7 PR4
http://www.johnchow.com PR6 PR4
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/ PR6 PR3
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/ PR6 PR4
http://andybeard.eu PR5 PR3
Vlad PR4 PR2

Here’s more at andybeard.eu (Give the page a bit to load, it hammered) Here’s a snippet but go here to read the rest.

Real or Fake PageRank Update In Progress (round 3)

Courtney stopped by to let me know about what appears to be a real PageRank update that is in progress, if there can ever be a real update again.

Many of the blogs highlighted in the update just a couple of days ago seem to have reverted to their previous position.

Now for anyone who might be thinking otherwise, there are still some obvious penalties in place for a few sites, but it is less obvious for the more vocal networks.

Some sites and networks still have a penalty, as do some sites.

Some of those penalties seem to be a carry over from the first Google slap 2 weeks ago, and some seem to be much newer.

The changes could easily be written off as changes in total linkage compared to the remainder of the blogosphere, but it seems like Google have given a penalty to those they could get away with.

Domain	Starting PR	First PR Update	Second PR Update	Today’s PR
www.autoblog.com	6	6	4	4 or 6
www.engadget.com	7	7	5	5 or 7
www.problogger.net	6	6	4	6
www.copyblogger.com	6	6	4	6 or 7
www.joystiq.com	6	6	4	4 or 6
www.tuaw.com	6	6	4	4 or 6
www.searchengineguide.com	7	6	4	4 or 5
www.searchenginejournal.com	7	7	4	4 or 6
www.johnchow.com	6	5	4	4 or 5
www.quickonlinetips.com	6	6	3	3 or 5
www.seroundtable.com	7	7	4	4 or 6
weblogtoolscollection.com	6	6	4	4 or 6
andybeard.eu	5	4	3	3 4 or 5
www.blogherald.com	6	6	4	4 or 6
www.Forbes.com	7	7	5	4 5 or 6
www.sfgate.com	7	7	5	5 or 7
www.washingtonpost.com	7	7	5	5 or 7
www.technosailor.com	6	6	3	3 or 5
www.9rules.com	8	8	5	4 5 or 6
blog.nafurai.com	3	3	2	1 or 2
courtneytuttle.com	3	2	1	1 2 3 or 4
www.SunTimes.com	7	7	5	5 or 7
TheGadgetBlog.com	5	5	3	3 or 5
Space.com/	7	7	5	5 7 or 8
OneMansBlog.com	6	6	4	5 4 or 6
entrepreneurs-journey.com	6	5	3	3 or 5
The following are site updates which were not hit by a penalty previously for comparison purposes
www.hobo-web.co.uk	7	7	7	5
www.doshdosh.com	4	4	4	6
www.searchengineland.com	7	7	7	7
www.seomoz.org/blog	5	5	5	6
www.connectedinternet.co.uk	6	6	6	3 or 5
More news and updates available from source Andy Beard – Niche Marketing

Is this off the hook or what?! So I guess the best we can too is get in the fetal position and rock back and forth mumbling how PR doesn’t affect traffic and hope it all looks better in the morning. Here’s more discussions you can check out:

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=507987

There’s a ton of forum discussions going on right now on Sitepoint… just hop on over to the Google topic area of the forums.

You can also find a bunch on Digitalpoint’s Google forum area located here.

And finally, check out this post on www.dailyblogtips.com

Special thanks to Donna for sharing all these links with me… I was actually ignoring this issue because so much has been going wrong for me lately that I just didn’t need a Google disaster, but looks like I have to deal with this shit storm now too… YAY! Best I can do is keep an eye on traffic and see what happens I guess. If you have some feedback or a comment, please click the comment button and use the form to share your thoughts.

It’s been longtime said that PR is “just a number” and has no bearing on your actual traffic, so I guess we’ll see a true test now. I noticed that we had this PR 4 going early last week, and so far, our traffic completely unaffected. Here’s a graph of our traffic for this month so far, and you can see last week was completely normal:

So to be quite honest, I suppose your bragging rights are taken away, but as long as my trafic continues to be solid and unaffected, I couldn’t care a less what Google did with their PR. So time to make some wait-and-see pudding!

Best of luck to you other webmasters!

Dan