WebProNews

Interlinking properties may be cause of recent downgrades

The pointy boot came down hard on more websites recently as Google knocked PageRank off sites for their paid link activities.

If you sell it for PageRank, or buy it for PageRank, Google may burn your site's PageRank in response.

The search engine has been fighting to clean up its index of listings Google considers of lesser value to searchers. More penalties appear to have been doled out recently, according to Search Engine Roundtable.

A discussion at Digital Point suggested too much interlinking of a publisher's sites could be a problem. One poster affected by Google's recent activity confirmed having interlinks.

All is not lost for webmasters who keep an eye on their PR scores. They can either remove the offending links, or nofollow them, and hope a reinclusion request finds a sympathetic eye at Google. Or they can take the Andy Beard route, and prevent Google from indexing paid link pages with a robots.txt directive.

The latter strategy means giving up on potential Google traffic in the hopes of drawing visitors from alternative sources. For Beard at least, that choice made more sense than altering links on his pages.