Google PageRank is now completely defunct after the war on link-farms
Jamie Harrop wrote on JohnChow's site how this might mark the death of Pagerank but I find the whole thing slightly hypocritical.
What they've done is penalised sites that they believe to be selling text-links on their site; which I can sort of understand. Google never take kindly to users attempting to game their systems, so I can concede that buying text-links purely for the PageRank benefit is dishonest. But doesn't it seem slightly hypocritical that a company who runs one of the biggest advertising networks is specifically penalising users for running (what is essentially) an alternative network on their site?
What would Google have users do? Add a nofollow to their text links? Why don't we just stop linking to other sites at all, genuine or otherwise
I do wonder what Google wants users to do because there's no real clarity in their actions. Websites like Forbes.com have been penalised and that's just not really very smart.
What Google have done is shot themselves in the foot, they've killed PageRank
Because of their latest actions, PageRank no longer means anything at all. You can no longer use it as a metric for the importance of a website because it only reflects well on those who are not brokering text links.
No longer will people look at the PageRank of a site and think it means anything. Google have killed the social importance of their ranking algorithm and that's a shame. It's as worthwhile as an Alexa ranking now, completely defunct.
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