What is Google doing with PageRank

Danny confirmed what we all expected yesterday – selling links can reduce your PR, reduce your rankings and stop you ranking for your own name.

I had expected that the next PR update would see sites like John Chow.com and the penalised web directories given PR 0 so that they couldn’t carry on selling links. Instead Google seems to be reducing their PR by one or two points.

How is this going to help matters?
As I see it the only way Google can stop link selling is to remove the PR from sites that blatantly sell links. Stopping a site ranking isn’t going to have any effect because most people don’t check the rankings of a site before they buy a link.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 7:57am ON Monday, 8 October 2007

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+