7 Authority Sites With A PageRank Penalty
Image credit: google pagerank
Google really got serious about giving out PageRank penalties in October last year. Andy Beard was at the centre of attention and the following post, a long with a couple of others that he did got a lot of traction:
Google PageRank Update October 2007
The 7 in the title of this post is not a fixed number. I want to put together a big list of all of the most important sites/pages on the net that appear to have PageRank penalties.
Normally PR penalties are applied to sites selling text links outside of the Google guidelines, but in some of these cases I couldn’t find any paid links. The sites may have internal linking issues or there might be other reasons. I just have a feeling that all of the following sites should have a higher PageRank score:
Enn.com
Environmental News Network is and environment news site and hub that has been around since before 1997. The website currently has a Google PR of 4/10, I am guessing it should be 8/10.
Possible reason for penalty: Up until very recently this site had spammy text links in its footer. These are gone now so maybe the site is due for an update. Or maybe there is another reason.
Update: I am pleased to report that Enn.com appears to be no longer penalised. The website’ homepage now has a PageRank of 7/10.
Fark.com
Fark is a very popular social news site and forum, which was established in 1999. The Fark.com homepage currently has a Google PageRank of 5/10, it should most probably be 8/10.
Possible reason for penalty: Unknown, anyone who can work out why this website is penalised will be given SEO god status – they nofollow everything. The only thing I can think of is the partner links – someone at Google may have mistaken these for payola.
Independent.ie
The Independent is a very popular Irish newspaper. The website currently has a Google PageRank of 4/10, I guess it should have a Google PageRank of at least 7 out of 10.
Possible reason for penalty: Website has dofollow text links to commercial sites in a drop down menu in the top nav. which says more services.
Update: Someone has just pointed out to me that the sites that are linked to via the drop down menu are owned by the Independent, so it is possibly a mistake on Google’s part if those are indeed the cause. Even if they explain on a reinstatement that they own those sites, Google may still keep them penalised – purely because of their anchor text choices and the fact that they are linking from a trusted news source to highly commercial properties.
Online.WSJ.com
The Wall Street Journal is beyond important. The homepage of this site currently has a Google PageRank of 5/10. I am guessing that the site should have a PR of 8/10.
Possible reason for penalty: Unknown
STPT.com
According to Wikipedia in 1997 Starting Point was the 7th most trafficked site on the net. Sometime during the 1st few months of 2008 the sites PageRank dropped from 7 or 8 out of 10 to 5/10. At the April 2008 PageRank update the sites PageRank again fell, this time to 4/10.
Possible reason for penalty: It looks like the website may have been penalised because of the directory of websites it has. Website owners can pay $99 per anum to have their website reviewed for a listing. IMO the directory is well maintained, but they need to make an effort to add more BOTW sites themselves.
TimesOnline.co.uk
The Times of London is one of the oldest and most well read and respected newspapers in the world. Website currently has a Google PageRank of 5/10 on its homepage, I am guessing it should be an 8/10.
Possible reason for penalty: Unknown, but there maybe some text links on the site somewhere that are leaking PageRank. I would say that if there is that it is probably just a mistake and not intentional.
Update: I am pleased to report that The Times is no longer penalised and back to a PageRank of 8/10.
W3Schools.com
Far more geeky then the rest of the sites, but equally important. The internet has been built on information provided by websites like this. Website homepage has a PR 5/10, I am guessing it should be an 8 or a 9/10.
Possible reason for penalty: It looks like the website may be selling text links..
If you know a really important site that has had its PageRank reduced just leave the URL, why you think it is important, your name and your website. If it is a good one it will be added to the list.
Update: Drew Broomhall from The Times has been in touch with me. Some unintended paid text links were the cause of the penalty. These links were nofollowed a long time a go, but the penalty remains.
I told Drew what he needed to do to get it back, but he did not seem overly concerned. He knows that PageRank penalties do not effect rankings or traffic. I have a feeling that now it has been talked about, it will get fixed.
Random thought: I have been trying to think of some reasons why a PageRank penalty could be bad for a website. Obviously for people in the SEM industry it is quite important. If you have a poor PageRank score, people might think that you are not very good at what you do. But what about other industries?
I have studied the effect of links from PageRank and -40 hit penalised sites and one thing that I am sure about is this: if the visible PageRank is not there then it cannot be passed. I am not suggesting that links from penalised sites do not work, because in some instances they definitely do. I believe that links from PageRank penalised sites do not pass as much trust and authority to the sites they link to.
So here is the only potential drawback for the publisher that I can think of: If you own other websites that you link to, then those sites will not be getting the credit they deserve in the search engines.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 26th, 2008 38 Comments
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June 26th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
The economist.com sold links and was knocked from a PR 8 to a PR 5. Since it has nofollowed its paid footer links it has regained its PR in record time.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
[...] it doesn’t have nearly the readership it deserves) has published an interesting post showing 5 really high authority sites that appear to have a PageRank [...]
June 27th, 2008 at 5:57 am
so everybody out there stop selling text links..
June 27th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Interesting read. Stop selling links.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Google does some strange things, I heard about a website that was incorrectly penalized for selling links, the links were no-followed and the site wasn’t doing any wrong. Just makes me wonder who does the checking.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Hackersafe took a huge hit a few months back. They were actually using as a selling pitch the fact that if you join you get 3 pagerank 7 inlinks. Well, it backfired on them.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Google is really intense about its page rankings.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Hi Mike, that would have been a good one. I forgot about the HackerSafe directory. They have 301′d now so I can’t use it until I am sure the penalty is still there. At the next PR update I will get it added to the list.
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Thewhir.com has also lost PR. They were PR 6 or 7 before.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
[...] 5 Authority Sites With A PageRank Penalty [...]
July 20th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Google does some strange things, I heard about a website that was incorrectly penalized for selling links, the links were no-followed and the site wasn’t doing any wrong. Just makes me wonder who does the checking.
http://www.dj4ar.net/vb
August 19th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Hi David,
I still can’t get my head around how people get so caught up with PR. I know Alexa isn’t accurate but I’ve seen sites with a PR 4 and 10million+ on Alexa and sites with no PR and Alexa of 200,000+ and getting traffic.
Can it be safely assumed that PR does not guarantee much other than a “tool” to sell links?
Thanks
August 19th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
[...] My response to clients (admittedly in hindsight) was the right one… “decline it”. Google’s hit bigger sites than Findlaw in the past including the Economist, the Times of London, and the Wall Street Journal (link cite). [...]
August 20th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Hi Scott, at the moment PageRank has a big impact on search engine rankings. Authority and trust rule though. PageRank and authority are very closely linked.
August 20th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Does google manually browse the sites and source code looking for links that follow or what. This seems like a daunting task. How do they do it?
August 21st, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I admit, I used to be a pagerank junkie. I’m getting better by going to weekly meetings at the local church immediately following the AA Meeting. I still look at and consider pagerank, and it is a great quarterly report card. If I have a PR of 5 and it drops to a 3 it will hurt. But…I know now that as long as the SERPS are still hitting then I have nothing to worry about. I just keep on keeping on, as Joe Dirt says.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
“Does google manually browse the sites and source code looking for links that follow or what. This seems like a daunting task. How do they do it?”
I have no idea, sorry.
September 5th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
[...] Sei vorsichtig wenn du Werbeleuten text-basierte Geschenke machst oder Ihnen gratis Artikel anbietest. Verstehe was Linkspam bedeutet. [...]
September 15th, 2008 at 10:14 am
[...] Beware advertisers bearing text-based gifts, or generous offerings of ‘free’ articles. Understand linkspam [...]
September 16th, 2008 at 9:11 am
[...] 75. היזהרו ממפרסמים שיש להם מתנות מבוססות-טקסט, או הצעות נדיבות למאמרי חינם. [...]
October 9th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
[...] – bookmarked by 5 members originally found by rejectedvideos on 2008-09-25 5 Authority Sites With A PageRank Penalty http://www.seoco.co.uk/blog/2008/06/26/pr-penalised-authority-sites/ – bookmarked by 4 members [...]
November 6th, 2008 at 12:42 am
I used to be a pagerank junkie. I’m getting better by going to weekly meetings at the local church immediately following the AA Meeting. I still look at and consider pagerank, and it is a great quarterly report card. If I have a PR of 5 and it drops to a 3 it will hurt. But…I know now that as long as the SERPS are still hitting then I have nothing to worry about. I just keep on keeping on
November 14th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Even I have the same paradoxical view as Scott. I know a site (not mine, I work as a content writer for the site) that is just under a year months old, has a PR of 3 yet it ranks within 400,000 and gets good traffic. Of course there’s a lot of on-site and off-site work is going on aggressively maybe that’s the reason.
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:20 pm
This makes for a very interesting read. I guess the moral to the story is do not pay for links to your website, or you will be punished accordingly.
I have been trying to increase my site’s page rank and have been offered services like this, and I guess I was right to say no…
December 25th, 2008 at 1:10 am
Oh lol, you know Google!
February 1st, 2009 at 11:28 pm
pali furniture…
This whole mess isn’t worth one thin dime!…
February 2nd, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Each people has his/her consideration about anything, including selling ad link text. Many people are not like you guys, they like to sell link text. There are a lot of dollars around this business.
February 6th, 2009 at 6:47 am
Hahaha.. even 3wschool get penalty.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
My site just lost 3 points in Page Rank (March 18, 2009). I can’t for the world of me figure out why. However, one of my secondary pages, off my index page, went up a page rank. This page has no backlinks, while my index page went up from 160 to 260 links since last PR Increase. Is this a fluke?
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:42 am
Oh.. This good info.
TQ
March 29th, 2009 at 8:30 am
I don’t bother about Page Rank. But this story is interesting!
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:18 am
I Lost PR google…My site now is 0 PR google
August 11th, 2009 at 4:16 am
Seems the prs of these websites have come back.
August 18th, 2009 at 8:14 am
It’s need hard work to keep high pagerank.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I don’t think pagerank is as important as ranking on the first page for a big keyword… These days people don’t care much about page rank, they care about other stuff like Google rankings and trust factor of a site..!
December 25th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Well, I think you one of Guru on Google lol
My opinion is, Google page rank isn’t really important. The really important think is traffic rank of your site.
But that’s just my opinion lol
January 4th, 2010 at 12:00 am
I used to be a huge pagerank junkie but I am not anymore. Who cares about pagerank, I just want to start ranking somehow
January 31st, 2010 at 3:47 pm
I’ve given up on pagerank , the only thing of importance is my google ranking. Unless of course your selling links in which case PR is the bit making you money.