By Randy Zlobec

It’s Dead, Jim; You Get His Google Page Rank, I’ll Get His Wallet!

Huh? Well, Google recently updated its algorithm for ranking websites, lovingly referred to as the “Google Slap”, and blogs and websites started gasping and griping. Some of the more well-known high ranked sites suffered a 1 or 2 level drop in Page Rank. They were not happy and rightly so. These sites have provided quality content, followed all the rules and had no reason to be susceptible to a Page Rank drop. So, what the heck happened? When prominent sites like CopyBlogger and The Washington Post suffer, the small guys get nervous.

In order to understand what happened, one needs to understand what Page Rank is and how it impacts on websites. Google is responsible for the page rank. It’s a misunderstood term that is often confused with search rank. Named after Google’s co-founder, Larry Page (Page Rank, get it), its actually a measurement of the page’s importance and not your search engine position. It’s all about popularity of your pages based on the number of times it is cited or linked back from other websites.

Why would people think this was a dead issue? Like all things with search engine positioning and optimization, brokers began to sell links from high Page Rank sites to lower ranked sites in order to raise their page rank. While this is still done, it is not looked upon kindly by Google. They are looking for natural backlinks from websites that have found value from something that is posted on your site and cited it on theirs.

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