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Google, Don Quixote of linksales

Ever since the beginning of the year the sale as well as purchase of textlinks for the improvement manipulation of the searchengineranking, especially for Google, has been a subject in this blog: I have shown dangers, explained why the widespread sale of links constitutes a problem for the Searchengine-giant, pointed to some model of identification and finally even doubted if Google would follow up their marked announcements with actions. This has happened yesterday. After Google depreciated the displayed PageRank for an apparent linkseller in the us-American region a few weeks ago, the same was done yesterday on an Internet-wide scale which also included the German Internet. For quite a few sites, the PageRank, which Google displays in the Toolbar, was depreciated. At the same time they did not stop at “big names” – “Die Zeit”, for example, fell from PageRank 7 to 5 thanks to the linksale, the statistics-service “etracker” fell from 8 to 5 and even international powerhouses like the “Forbes” magazine fell from 7 to 5. more complete lists of the delinquents can be found at Jojo, for example and while we certainly also have a respectable amount of PageRank-data from which we can reach our own conclusions I will not publish them - “i told you so”-postings are not really up my alley.

What consequences does this step by Google have now? None for the Googleindex at the moment, from yesterday until today there has only been the usual shifting of the “Everflux” but no grave changes which we could trace back to the depreciations. I am still rather sure that Google will stop the inheritance of LinkJuice for the affected sites completely or for the parts of the site where the links were sold – with the backlink-update we should be able to see changes. The linksellers still rank as before which means that there was no intervention there either. It seems though that this shot across the bows by Google has led a few of the large titles to get the meaning, which has led them to drive their IT-departments to move with, hitherto unknown, speed in removing the links.

If we look at the sites that are involved it quickly becomes clear that his is not the work of an algorithm but that of humans. It is much too obvious that some known linksellers were affected while others, who used exactly the same integrations, got away. In connection to this it is also interesting to see that many, if not all, blogs that wrote and published reviews from Trigami were concerned – the “footprint” with the Trigami-logo as well as the link at the beginning of the article seem to have been too enticing not to be used. This step should also have been important to reach the goal of these actions: to circulate and reinforce Google's message that the linksale is evil and will not be tolerated. It seems that they have reached their goal, my feedreader is bristling with articles on this topic, my phone is ringing off the hook and there is a racket in far reaches of the Internet. May the second round of this game beginn.