Latest Google Update: Google Page Rank vs. Google Toolbar and Page Rank as Commodity
What’s The Difference Between Google Page Rank and Google Toolbar Page Rank?
Page rank and Google Toollbar Page Rank are actually two different things.
The page rank showing in your toolbar is taken from a snapshot of your site weeks ago. It is also different from what your actual/daily/hourly page rank is- that is the “real” page rank Google uses internal to decide if your site should be on page 1,2,7,1184 of search engine results pages. Only Google really knows what that number is.
Google PR is a made up number that has little or no value in terms of traffic. What has happened is companies have used to toolbar as indicator of a sites worth and the PR itself has become a commodity. Companies, like www.payperpost.com and text-link-ads have used to the toolbar to sell page rank. The selling of a sites page rank being passed on is the product.
Google warned- several weeks ago- that it would target sites that sold links i.e. PR . It asked advertisers to add nofollow tags to outbound links that had been paid for.
And they did target and that is why the drastic drops for many sites.
If you are part of a network ( and PPP is not a network) that is a flag.
If you use Text Links Ads or have Text link ads script on your site, you may be hit.
Basically- if you are selling links ( i.e. PR ) Google wants you to ad nofollow tags and will penalize you if you don’t.
That’s what happened.
My problem with this is that MOST website owners would have no idea about this policy (well… maybe now they do) ... and not really an idea of what to do with it.
I suspect that a lot of this has to do with reinforcing its grip internet advertising with PPC (AdWords) and little to do with integrity of its search results.
Many ( like I do) think that Google may have shot itself in the foot with this one. The people that care MOST about page rank are SEO’s and internet marketers and they were the one probably most affected.
