Just few weeks ago, we noticed Google downgraded PageRanks on some popular sites like John Chow going from PR6 to PR5. Now we are hearing all over the Internet with another PageRank downgrades amongst other popular blogs like: Problogger PR 6 to PR4, Copyblogger PR6 to PR4, and Engadget from PR 7 to PR5. There are plenty more blogs and websites that lost PR. Check out the list here at DailyBlogTips.

Looks like Google is trying to penalize people selling text links and marketplaces like text-link-ads. With so many people earning income from internet advertising, this PageRank downgrade will hurt them. We all know PageRank is a scale that determines the ad rate, but might not be in the future.

Google is trying to sway away from people buying and selling text links on their sites well as not to focus strictly on PageRank system. This is true. Do not rely so much on PageRank when you are buying and selling advertising. Look for traffic, relevancy, and ad location; choose between text link or banner ad for better conversion. Most importantly, able to track incoming traffic from that ad space and able to figure our return on investment: Example: capturing email addresses, using these leads to makes future sales, or have them subscribe to your newsletter and RSS feed.

Filed under: Tech Industry