Twice in the last week or so the Google Page Ranking of this website dropped. At first I was a bit baffled and concerned like everyone else on the web that experienced similar activity. That is until I figured out why it happened. It is only a theory of course but one based on good evidence. The reason that Google is dropping the pagerank of websites is to stop Adsense competitors from taking advantage of using pagerank.

The pagerank for this site was 6 and probably was due to go up since the links in increase with the popularity of some of the GPL software distributed. But it fell to 5 about 10 days ago. I attributed this to the rumors that Google was penalizing crosslinking and the selling of links. But then a strange thing happened. About 5 days ago I changed the ads on Hiveminds to include a new ad network called from www.contextweb.com. Two days after the page rank of Hiveminds dropped to 3. So this seems to point to the fact that Google is not targeting link farmers but are instead targeting their ad competitors that use Google page rankings to calculate the advertising worth of a website.

Quite simply Google wants to put a ceiling on websites that gain revenue from their high pageranks. Probably because a high pagerank means that a competing ad network that pays more will get premier placement on websites. Google Adsense though still present on a site will get placed out of the web pages hot spots. Google Adwords buyers will stop paying for Google ads and go with the competing company where they get more for their money.

Page ranking is now a dead or dying phenomenon. Good ridance I say because it is a lot easier to get good advertisers based on content and visitor stats. But just after I thought this I became worried. When I go looking for an ad network for a website I usually use Google Adsense statistics and Google Analytics. Will Google change and start hiding certain information from my accounts to prevent me from using the information to influence advertising purchasers? Probably not since in is not quite the same thing. Page ranking is visible to all but Google Adsense stats are hidden and protected by a terms of service agreement. Better news is that no other search engine has started a system that competes with Google page ranking. Maybe Yahoo and the others are smart enough to know that page ranking is not a good indicator of the worth of a website.

Now though this new situation is a wake up call for many it is probably not the one that Google is expecting. When a large company like Microsoft.. er ... Google has a monopoly on the behavior of its users those users have a tendency to start rebelling. In the next few weeks I expect to see an increase in blogs on switching away from Adsense forms like, Yahoo, Contextweb and more bloggers doing their own ads through systems like Open Ads. Internet advertising looks to be headed into a boom year and Google does not want to loose out on any revenue.

While pagerank may fall the visitor stats of good websites are not effected. Ad networks will just switch to using the older ways of gaining stats and using other systems like Alexa and Compete. I really don't think anyone one will miss the pagerank revolution. Many will just say "...Good-bye and thanks for all the fish".


Happy Publishing!

Ten years of experience in web development. Carl is looking for in employment as a Senior PHP/mySQL Developer in Stockholm.
Carl McDade - Systems Developer