Pagerank returns, and with it, spam
by Sapphire (December 6, 2007)
I have several sites that are zeroed out at the moment in terms of pagerank. Most of them I’m leaving alone to see how long it takes advertisers to go away (so far, they’re staying, which would seem to indicate either they’re not just buying pagerank when they buy links, or they never check their links).
But on one site, I was down to one puny paid link and thought what the hell. I canceled that link and filled out Google’s offensively confession-like reinclusion request thingie, and the pagerank was returned about 5 days later.
Within hours, the spam was back, bigtime. This is interesting, because Vlad saw just the opposite with the spam when he banned the Googlebot from his site. The difference is that I had a visible PR of zero, while his says “unranked”. But why that would make a difference, I have no idea.
Bottom line? I don’t think Google is quite the center of the netiverse that they imagine themselves to be. It looks like maybe people really do do things for reasons other than OMG will this help me with Google? What will Google think? What would Google do? Does Google like me? Can I make them like me better? If I assassinate someone important, would they notice me?
I need to design and market a line of “WWGD - What Would Google Do?” merchandise.
Posted in SEO
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December 6th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Sigh! … We are in a world of google and everything we does have to put google there. Haha!
December 6th, 2007 at 8:15 am
I think the increase of spam was probably associated with the fact that I have removed “nofollow” from my comments. It is hard to say though.
Some of my blogs though after being ranked zero are back to their previous rank. I am speculating here, but maybe Google is moving to some sort of different rank system, or maybe they will be updating the PR dynamically instead of doing so once a quarter. We know they have been doing that for long time and what was shown in the toolbar was a little outdated. But who knows?
December 6th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Hmm. I have had do-follow on this site for months and seen no increase in spam. I think there have to be other factors.
I’m not seeing any of my zeroes bounce back yet - except the one where I asked for reinclusion. Of course, the ones I got zeroed on do still have paid links up, so I’m not shocked.
December 6th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Oh I love the merchandise. I think it could be a hit.
I haven’t noticed much increase in spam with do follow links. I get a few from the site where I listed myself as do follow but most are people out there actually commenting and they seem to actually at least look at the picture.
I’ve been looking around and haven’t noticed a lot of talk about this. As far as I can tell I am not breaking any of MSN’s rules, but they hate a few of my sites–won’t index them even after I request–and they used to index them. The only thing that I can think of is that the ones they hate are all addon domains. Have you found this anywhere?
December 6th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
@ MMM (Make Money Online)
Gosh that would have been a great anchor text!
Just jocking. I stopped using Akismet about one year ago- it was catching wrong people. It caught many legitimate comments so I have switched to Spam Karma Plugin.
@Sapphire
I have not requested the reinclusion, but I the website I mentioned never sold any links, got slashed to a zero just to recover to the previous rank two weeks later. I do however own a website- the worst offender of all that was not touched by Google but it was only PR2 to begin with.
December 19th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Could it be that google really isn’t God? Seriously maybe removing no follow causes them some grief! then again it could be the result of trying to take over too much control of the net!!! James