Two Reasons Why Google May Kick You Down
One reason why Google lowers the page rank or PR of a blog could be that the blog loads too slowly or slower than it should. My blog was loading slowly yesterday due to a banner that was holding it up. The banner changed servers and things were not done correctly. It was fixed within 24 hours but the damage has been done as the bots were just visiting at that time.
Another reason for Google to lower the PR could be that the frequency of posting new content is not high enough in Google’s eyes. This, however, is likely a much smaller reason for being kicked down. I say this because I’ve seen blogs with no new posts and very little activity for over 6 months that have retained their rank.
Today my blog’s PR was lowered from PR4 to PR3 and also 4 of my blog’s pages have been lowered from rank 2 to rank 1. This has happened after about a year of rank stability and for no other reason, except the above stated 2, that I can surmise.
It needs to be said that whatever reasons Google has for doing this, they could be entirely different from what anyone may think or suppose. It is not at all clear what Google really wants and values in spite the hints they give so grudgingly.
I’ve seen blogs, pages and videos with a lot of reader and viewer interaction and high perceived value that have much lower rank than blogs, pages and videos that hardly anybody reads, watches and comments on.
What Makes Sense and What Doesn’t About Google
Observing things like that, including the way Google is changing YouTube (read my previous post about new YouTube), it seems that the way Google acts sometimes, it makes no sense at all. Still, it makes sense to be on the good side of Google. Being on the good side of Google means doing things honestly without trying to fool it even if it doesn’t pay off.
When Google implies that a slow loading site may be punished, it pays off to make it load fast. When Google implies, and they never seem to make things 100% clear, that a site with a lot of incoming links will be rewarded by sitting high in Google search engine results and will receive a higher PR rank it doesn’t necessarily pay off not to try to build links faster than would be natural. But in the long run nobody can outsmart Google which is why it’s much better not to build links artificially.
That being said, it still surprises me how honest links tend to disappear over time. From 32 links that were on my blog in the summer of last year, as per Google, there were later only 11, then 3 and soon perhaps there will be none left. The number of indexed pages, on the other hand, has risen disproportionately.
Since Google has the biggest slice of the pie, people tend to focus most of their attention on Google. But how about the other search engines, namely Yahoo and Bing, are they behaving more rationally? Yes and no.
From what I could observe over the years, their search results seem to be more stable. When it comes to links and indexed pages and their stability they have recently, in the last 6 months or so, changed dramatically for the worse.
What’s your take on this, do you care about your blog’s PR (I mean page rank not public relations) links and what Google does?
Please comment, then tweet it, bookmark it, facebook and google+ it. Yes, facebook it and google+ it are now verbs, calls to action.
After having done that watch this cute sleeping cat familly with a kitten on guard.
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Authored by Vance Sova
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