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.
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January 31st, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Hi Eric, thanks for the mention
A couple of small corrections
So far since Google started to give sites a toolbar pagerank penalty for supposed paid links, I haven’t seen any conclusive proof that anyone has received reduced traffic directly from Google search.
Blogs on blogspot don’t get PR4 automatically, I have a number of them. Of all the free blogging platforms Wordpress.com is probably the easiest to gain a few free links on through their tagging system.
PageRank currently has very little to do with search results these days, it is more to do with crawl depth and frequency, though even that may not be as true as it was.
The internal PageRank which Google uses seems to be unaffected by these penalties, but Google has been increasing applied penalties over time, so may do something more permanent and damaging in the future.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:13 am
There *may* have been some sort of google hiccup in the past week–as I noticed a rise on my blog to PR6 (and I’m nowhere near being a bigtime player in anything…)
It could be as Andy says that crawl depth and frequency have something to do with the rise, which I *think* would correlate to site content that’s relative to particular search results. If you’re creating content that’s somehow popular, and then you are linked, and perhaps depending on where you are linked, then it may cause your page rank to rise. I notice with my blog that, even if I do not write on it for several days, I manage to maintain a certain amount of traffic, contingent on old content coming up in search.
It’s fun to try to contemplate the “mind” of Google, but it’s probably very inscrutable.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Thanks for all the great info Andy!
My direct experience with Google and PageRank dates back a few years ago now, but I was personally involved with a company that experienced a dramatic reduction in traffic from a seemingly random drop in PR. In this case it was from PR7 to PR6, and it was literally like the spigot had turned off (or at least most of the way!). This company was also highly dependent on Google search traffic — which obviously isn’t a great longterm strategy — so the loss in PR hurt all the more.
Further, I’ve heard Matt Cutts and others at Google claim at that PR is only one of many factors that influence indexing, etc. but again I’m obviously biased by own experience.
Very interesting with regard to “crawl depth and frequency,” I bet most people aren’t aware that that’s a factor these days.
About blogspot and PR4: again, based on my experience I’ve seen tons of new blogger sites pop up as a 4 as soon as they get any PR at all, which can be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. What has your experience been with sites that don’t get a 4?
By the way, the company that I mentioned above was punished by Google because it was assumed to be a splog when in fact it was high quality, original content. Very interesting to see Google’s latest cause to knock down sites with too many paid links.
It’s fascinating — and in some ways disturbing, of course — to see the heavy-handed influence that Google can play in the lives of legit web publishers trying to make a living online.
In any event, I hope Gabe works it out with Google (never easy) and gets the page rank, crawl depth/frequency, and indexing that he deserves.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Tish - If you can grab a PR6 on your site, I would take it and run!
February 1st, 2008 at 12:37 pm
ohyeah…I was doing an old-fashioned Snoopy-style happy-dance when that one happened. let’s see where it goes from here
February 1st, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Have you noticed a spike in google search traffic?
February 1st, 2008 at 1:28 pm
yep. Since I’ve started work with both NewsTrust and Placeblogger (as well some other stuff) my blogging frequency’s gone down considerably. Traffic, however, stays rather constant. A few new blogroll permalinks links account for that, but it’s mostly worldwide google search traffic. So, oddly, when I don’t have anything new to say, people are reading what I’ve already said.
February 1st, 2008 at 2:10 pm
That’s fantastic tish, congrats!
Sounds like you’ve built up quality content archives that bring in a steady stream of traffic which is now aided by the bump in Google PR, very cool!