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.

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.

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.