Time to pay the Page Rank Piper

While shying away from the meager page rank that this site has, the Google update has caused some real issues, and not just for link farming, but for respected, well-read, and well-followed sites. So not only do we have performance and audience building issues with Web 2.0, but now we have a page rank system that is also off on its own tangent. In the mean time, the list of people who took the page rank hit is impressive.

* Engadget (from 7 to 5)
* AutoBlog (from 6 to 4)
* Problogger (from 6 to 4)
* Coolest Gadgets (from 5 to 3)
* Washington Post (from 7 to 5)
* Washington Times (from 6 to 4)
* Charlotte Observer (from 6 to 4)
* Forbes.com (from 7 to 5)
* SFGate.com (from 7 to 5)
* Sun Times (from 7 to 5)
* New Scientist (from 7 to 5)
* Seattle Times (from 6 to 4)

This list came from Daily Blog Tips and has been shortened.

Techrunch though is predicting that some of the other sites that took a page rank hit like Download Squad, Autoblog and others will soon be joining the list of dead pool web sites, which would be unfortunate. If you think about this in terms of business, and in terms of being able to set up how sponsorships and advertising dollars work. This might actually work more in favor of the little folks.

There is a long list of B and C class bloggers that might do much better now with the revised page rank of the majors being lowered. It certainly ups the ante when it comes to writing good content and getting people to come visit the web site.

What this might do though according to Andy Beard though is reduce the effectiveness of PayPerPost. We have tinkered with PayPerPost on this blog, and written some articles, but only ones that make sense for this blog. If that has caused the web site though to suffer in relationship to its page rank, which drives search results and status in Google, then many people will start opting out of using PPP because traffic is more important than writing a 5 dollar article with links to other sites. That will kill the buzz building groups, and essentially kill off PPP as a viable option to make money off a blog. This is probably going to be more focused on people’s blogs who are nothing but PPP posts, while folks who use it when there is a connect between content and the blog makes sense.

In the mean time, this is good for B and C list bloggers, this is bad for blog groups like WebLogs.inc, this bad for PPP and Text Link ads folks, and anyone else who is doing reviews via some mechanism like PPP.