Google Rolls Out PageRank, To Kill Blog Farms
Posted October 25th, 2007 by Alex Ion
This will be considered a milestone in all this Google PageRank buzz, because the last few days showed that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is really on it this time. Annoyed by the fact that people abuse the PR and makes money out of it, the algorithm changed to penalize link farms. This is still an assumption, though having Matt Cutts screaming everywhere about it, we believe this is the case.
So far, Google rewarded blogs that people linked to, with high PageRank and everyone used it as a method of appreciation of how good the blog is. However this changed very sudden with top ranking blogs like Engadget going from PR7 to PR5, AutoBlog going from PR6 to PR4 and DownloadSquad to PR4 down from PR5.
The problem I see now, and TechCrunch mentioned, is with small blog networks that relied on PR in order to make sales. A blog without traffic could sell because of the rank, but now if Google is trying to catch everyone I am not sure if they might close their doors.
