An ‘Independent Web Advice’ Blog

Has Google gone Bananas again?

On behalf of a client I was checking out the Google Page Rank for competitor sites that list more highly than my clients site. He has a site that is stuffed with useful information and is constantly being updated. It is user friendly, has hundreds of backlinks, a PR of 3 and lots of loyal users. SO what is up?

Under certain keywords, that the site should perform well by, the site is not to be seen anywhere in the Google listings. Plus competitor sites that are PR1, that are really really bad, that have either old or duplicated content, or worse even that that, stolen material, all rank in the top 20. ????

Why? How? Has Google finally gone Bananas? My own site went from a PR of 5 to a PR of 4 this morning, and has since returned to a PR of 5. This to me indicates that either a big change is on the way in terms of how Google calculates PR, or that PR is simply irrelevant to SE listings.

Take a look, sites with a pr of 1 often appear above sites with a pr of 3 or 4. I give up!

The golden rule has always been to make sites for users first, then for SEO or whatever other pressures there are. This rule is still no.1 of course. Content is still king. But if stolen content is not being monitored any more, then VOLUME will be king, not quality or originality. I hope this is not so, or the web will be destroyed in an avalanche of site scrapers and cloned sites.

Paul

Moaning on a Monday.

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