Daily Express and OK hit with PageRank penalty
There was a story yesterday that the Express has been emailing SEOs selling links. I went over to the Express home page. And was fairly shocked to see it has a toolbar pagerank of just 4, which seems incredibly low for a newspaper site (er, it puts it on a par with my homepage toolbar pagerank!).
It definitely used to be higher than this.
This blog from April 2009 had it as PR7 (scroll down to the graph). As does SiteLogr (which collates data on websites). The same is true of Surcentro.
Update The OK website has also been hit. Its toolbar pagerank is now 2 as Andrew points out in the comments.
- 154 days ago it was PR 5 according to realwebsiteworth.com.
- 39 days ago it was PR 3 according to website shadow.
- 7 days ago it was PR 2 according to sitelogr.com.
I originally said it looks like Google has reacted to the revelation by penalising the visible pagerank of the Express. This data for OK suggests its being downgraded for some time - but did take another hit in the last month.
Express: pagerank penalty
Interesting.
Crikey - I got my personal blog up to 4 in under a year. Maybe Google has added a good taste element to its algorithm?
Thanks Malcolm,
Great that Google is living up to it's promise of 'don't be evil'. It's a good thing for the Internet and the SEO industry that this has happened.
Using Linkstream plugin I see that OK magazine homepage (ok.co.uk) has a PR ranking of just 2! This is appalling for such a well know magazine but probably a reflection of the poor content.
It will be interesting to see which clients use advertorials on Express Group websites over the coming months. Or whether Express Group will abandon their strategy altogether.
best,
Andrew Gill
Linkstream - SEO Web App
I'm not saying it's going to be the reason, but they don't help themselves.
http://express.co.uk 302s to /home
http://www.express.co.uk 302s to /home
no www preference, 302s instead of 301s etc.
Not the best set up for a major homepage, and poor internal linking too e.g. http://twitter.com/richardtvaughan/statuses/12691890546
Good spot; I assumed Google would do diddly squat (at least in the short term). This is one of those times I'd be glad to be wrong!
Andrew - good spot re OK. I've found some interesting data showing how it went from 5 to 3 over the last few months - and down to 2 in only the last month. See updated post.
Interesting update Malcolm - thanks.
It appears Express Group are getting increasingly desperate to generate revenue no matter how ethical or short term. Long-term the newspaper industry as a whole (in printed form) is unsustainable under their current business model.
Google understand this - it's taken a while (the writing has been on the wall for many years) but i think this is a desperate tactic from a sinking ship. Bad for jobs but good for trees
I'm looking forward to reading free news (without any Murdoch bias) on my iPad very soon
best,
Andy
http://www.Linkstream.co.uk - SEO Web App
I see the site as having a PR 4 at the moment
The website (http://ok.co.uk/home/) has a Google PR ranking of 2 currently.
Gary - what URL are you looking at?
cheers,
Andy
http://www.Linkstream.co.uk - SEO Web App
You're all jumping up and down about green fairy dust?
Who cares? They're still in google.
Good spot Ian Miller!
I've just done a few checks and the OK site also 302's, well actually http://www.ok.co.uk 301s to ok.co.uk which 302's to /home.
If this has been put in place over the last few months then OK has now lost the benefit of around 215,000 external links and Express, 261,000 according to Open Site Explorer and could therefore possibly explain the gradual decrease in PR.
Of course this is only speculation but it could just be a coincidence or both have actually happened.
[...] then saw a report saying that Google has indeed penalised the Daily Express. I checked the page rank of the Daily [...]
Funny, the "reputable" SEO company that was trying to sell me links on The Express' website only just got back in touch with me last week. I wonder how many other newspaper websites they have their grubby mitts on?
Nice to know that Google rates my own blog (let alone Lib Dem Voice) more highly, but really says far more about how badly the Express has got it wrong.