There has been a lot of talk recently about the drop in pagerank of a number of sites, from ProBlogger to the Washington Post - the suspected cause being link selling. First off, let’s put it in perspective - it is a suspected cause - no one knows for sure. But even if it is the case, does it matter?

Think of PageRank as an after thought. It is a value that supposedly sums up the strength of pages on your site. Being a sum up, it can only occur after the real goings on have taken place. If your pagerank drops during an update (we’re assuming it hasn’t been manually changed for now), then the reasons for that change have already happened. The drop in value does not mean your site has suddenly changed in any way, shape, or form. The drop won’t affect your future traffic results either - the underlying factors have been gradually doing that, the factors that PR is based off.

What if it is manually dropped? Well, that’s a harder question to answer. If only pagerank gets adjusted, then nothing has really changed - apart from the view that webmasters hold of the site. If other things have become affected, such as traffic levels, or SERP positioning (and if it isn’t a naturally occuring change) - that’s when you should start worrying!

I think the whole debate over PageRank in itself means that Google has the upper-hand. I’d consider a pagerank value as smoke and mirrors, in that there is no reason to trust it. PR has power because webmasters still use it as an indication, in the same fashion that Google uses links so heavily in their rankings!

Start changing the way you think - why look at PageRank, when you can monitor your own traffic levels (and quality to some degree) through analytics programs. If you want a good self-hosted script, check out phpmyvisites. If you own a wordpress blog, why not use the wordpress.com hosted analytics solution. You could even use Google’s own analytics solution, although I wouldn’t right now.

It’s not a difficult concept to grab hold of - just start monitoring and evaluating what matters…

Your traffic. Your SERPS.


PS. I know I haven’t really tackled the issue of link selling in relation to the drop seen in pagerank, but it is obvious that you have to be under the radar. If Google wants to penalise them, that’s their choice, but don’t make it easy for them! You have just as much right to sell links as they do.

If you use a broker, make sure they restrict search engine employees from entering, and that their inventory is not visible to the public. And please, don’t mark them in an obvious fashion - in fact, don’t put them in the sidebar or footer at all.