Recently Google update its pagerank database. The page rank is a Google intern measure to judge the relevance of a homepage. Until recently the page rank of maljaysia.de was “4” which is quite good for a private website, and might have been a result of many blogger friends linking to maljaysia.de. After the last update my page rank was reduced by 50% to “2”. I didn’t have a clue why this happened and thought it would be an arbitrary thing, Google would just do from time to time, like that episode, where my friend Jan was thrown out of the Google index. But it appears that there was another reason. From time to time, I’m doing paid reviews for the Swiss service Trigami, which I consider a decent and interesting option for bloggers to gain some revenue from there hobby. But reviews for Trigami also include links to the reviewed website/company/product. Google obviously considers those links as “paid links” and has policies which forbid those links. So my Weblog was punished and my pagerank reduced. I could have added an attribute (rel=’nofollow’) to those links, preventing search engines to follow those links, but in my opinion – if I willingly (even paid) create such links, the relations should also be recognized by search engines!

Anyway, although the pagerank of maljaysia.de can be neglected now, it seems to rank higher on search engines. Since two weeks the average number of visits to my page climbed from 75 to over 100 at the moment.

This entry was posted by Jürgen Hösch on Sunday, November 4. 2007 at 20:37. and is filed under Web-Site. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own blog.