Techmeme, web publishing, and Google PageRank
There’s a great article by Andy Beard and fascinating subsequent conversation between Beard and TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera here.
In short, Beard discovered that TechMeme’s Google PageRank had mysteriously dropped from a 6 or 7 to a 4 in a short period of time. Mysterious is the word, by the way, as TechMeme has always been and continues to be a high quality aggregator of tech news conversations and there is seemingly no reason for Google to hammer it in its search listings in such a significant and terrifying way.
I say significant because if any person on the planet started a new blog on Blogger right now, you’d get assigned a PR 4 in all likelihood. And I say terrifying because when Google hammers your relative search rank, it has the potential to cripple your business and there’s normally very little you can do about it aside from praying, hoping, and tweaking your page content and then praying/hoping that a month or two or three in the future your ranking will be magically restored.
If any of this interests you in the slightest – and it should if you’re a web publisher, interested in search, or wonder how people on the Internet end up driving traffic and making money – head over and check out Andy’s post and its comments.
