It seems Google is just finishing off another much anticipated PageRank (PR)  update.

This time though, they seem to be following through with their threats to penalise sites that have sold links. Naturally, this has effected the sites buying links from them.

It looks like Google have done this by manually reducing the toolbar PR of guilty sites.  Here’s a list.

Directories have been hit as well. Avivadirectory.com, alivedirectory.com and bigweblinks.com have all had their PR dropped from 6 or 7 to 4 and internal pages de-indexed. This must be for buying links rather than selling them, since paying for a ‘review’ is supposed to be OK.

(It’s interesting to note that the PR of phplinkdirectory.com has only dropped from 7 to 6, even though the vast majority of links to it are ‘low quality’ footer links from directories using the script. This indicates a change in Google’s algorithm rather than the hand edit suffered by the directories.)

I run a niche directory that has suffered a little, it’s PR has dropped from 4 to 2. It seems a little unfair to penalise me for investing in my site, but hey… who am I to judge the mighty Google? My directory is still doing OK in the search engine results so I’m not too bothered.

What’s all this mean? Google are destroying PageRank as a measuring of site quality and trust.

That’s what we all want right? One possible source is links from Word cloud sites.

Of course, as with most things in life you get what you pay for and most SEO experts would say that Word Cloud sites provide a low quality link because:

• Most are just a page of links with no content.
• There are often hundreds of links on a page.
• Some could be considered ‘bad’ link neighborhoods.
• Many are on dropped domains.
• Sometimes the PageRank (PR) they display is not valid.
• They are usually unrelated to the sites they link to.

However, everyone knows that PR is important for ranking in Google and if that’s all you are interested in, you can get a link on a PR4, 5 or 6 Word Cloud site cheaply, quickly and easily.

I posted a list of Word Cloud sites back in January, and have had another look to see if how PR and prices had changed. Here are a few of the better ones (in terms of PR and price):

PR 6

• http://www.the444links.com/ – $10.00
• http://www.333links.net/ – $19.00

PR 5

• http://www.fatcalico.com/ – $1.50
• http://www.geofrontiers05.org/ – $1.95
• http://www.prestigetransfert.com/ – $3.00
• http://www.eliteone2one.com/ – $3.00
• http://www.bgcrv.org/ – $3.00
• http://amanojaku.org/ – $3.95

PR 4

• http://www.geek417.net/ – $0.50
• http://www.greatwallszechuanhouse.com/ – $0.95
• http://www.industriesettechniques.com/ – $1.00
• http://foursquare.ws/ – $1.00
• http://calgovrace.com/ – $1.95
• http://www.yagi3.com/ – $1.99
• http://www.intercedenow.com/ – $2.00
• http://www.gdsavoy.com/ – $2.00
• http://tak-team.org/ – $2.00
• http://www.raasmzone.com/ – $2.00

Note, all I have checked is the Google Toolbar PR and price. It’s up to you to check if the PR is valid and if the sites are active.

One of the problems with web directories can be the PageRank of internal pages – or rather the lack of it.

Directories are often advertised with reference to a high home PageRank but there is little point paying for a listing if the internal page it is on is not crawled or cached by the search engines.

Link Book Web Directory is an interesting example where the home page has a lower PageRank than the internal pages – it is PR4 and many of it’s categories are PR6. That makes it pretty good value at $34.99 for a featured listing, especially as it offers 10 extra deeplinks on the details page.

A quick way to check the PageRank of the internal pages of a directory is to use iWebtool.com visual pagerank checker. This will quickly display the PageRank of the destinations of all links on a page.

Looks like a Google Toolbar PageRank update is underway.

One is due, according to the update list at seocompany.com.

This site is now showing PageRank on some data centers (I use the ‘Live PR’ tool here) where it was showing 0 PageRank before. Some sites seem to be showing a lot more supplemental results than before as well, this site was showing 100% supplemental pages!

There were quite a few before (too many pages that are very similar to each other) but not all of them so something strange is going on, hopefully just while Google update their index.

There are quite a few tools out there for finding out how many backlinks you have and where they come from, but it is better to hear it from the horses mouth – we want to know what how many links Google thinks are pointing at our site.

Well, Google’s Webmaster Tools allow you see that. Once you have verified that you own a site (by uploading an html file to your server or including a special meta tag in your index page) you can view how many links to your site Google has indexed. (You also need a Google account)

The results are very interesting and a lot more useful than the inaccurate Link: operator available in Google search.

As well as showing the total number of external links to your site, the tool breaks them down to show which pages within your site they are pointing at, where they are coming from and the date they were last found. (Using this I’ve found a few directories that provide multiple links from one submission because of search results pages that are indexed).

You can also view a similar display for the internal link structure of your site. The number of internal links to a page helps Google rate the relative importance of pages within a site. Seeing it displayed this way helps to highlight problems in your internal link structure.

All this data can be downloaded. You could combine it with other data such as the pagerank of your site’s pages and the pages linking to them for a more thorough analysis.

You can also upload and check sitemaps, check your robots.txt file, view search queries for your site and other stuff I haven’t fully understood yet.

This tool is a must for anyone wanting to understand how Google crawls and interprets your site.

Find out more about it at: http://searchengineland.com/070205-165836.php