Simon Lissa

OK so I thought I would share my finding now that I have had some time to look this PR update further.

There is definitely something a little fishy going on with this update, in previous updates all of y domains would remain fairly stable I would have made one or two domains go up and another one or two go down but only a spot or two, this time 90% of my domains have moved! and not only a spot or two some have shifted dramatically 5 point of page rank in some cases.

The Two Extremes:

Substantial Loss:

On the extreme end of the losses I have had several domains drop from a PR 6 to a PR 2. This domain still has home page links from .gov and .edu home pages, hundreds of other quality links and a bunch of comments, articles, forum profiles and so on. Other similar shifts were a couple pr 4′s and 5′s dropping to zero or one. nothing dropped to NA.

The Substantial Gain:

On the flip side I also have multiple examples of domains making erratic shifts in an upward direction, a have practically brand new domain that I purchased in February and put content up on only about a month ago and I am talking only 20 odd pages of unique content. This domain went from a PR0 to a PR5!!! I also have other domains showing increased from a PR of 1 and 2 to 4 and 5…

If anyone want visual proof of this stuff then let me know I can email you the domains, I am not inclined to list them here to keep my network a secret.

Summary:

Believe me when I say that this is not at all inline with what had occurred in the past, Google has definitely thrown a spanner in the works, luckily for me I am a jack of all trades and

How Redundant is this now?

a spanner is just what I needed.

What does all this mean? well at first I was a little upset about it all, no longer being able to rely on PR to determine a domains authority would make it hugely difficult for me to

broker quality links but then I got to thinking, I never really did that in the first place. I have always accessed a domain on other factors high PR was simply an indicator or a flag that drew me towards the domains that would most likely have the variables I was after by the bucket load.

In no particular order these are some of the times I would be looking for to locate a good quality authoritative domain:

• DMOZ, Google, Yahoo and other authority directory listings
• Number of Inbound Links
• Type of Inbound Links e.g: .gov and .edu links, blog comments, forum profiles, home page links, site wide links and so on
• Social Presence
• Domain Age
• Number Of Archives (this is a really important one)
• Number Of Registered Drops and Registrants In The Domain History
• Alexa Rank (low importance)
• Content

There may be some adjustments to PR over the coming days/weeks while things settle down, however I feel this is unlikely, my gut feeling is that this was calculated move by

Google and a smart one. By throwing doubt into the link builders minds about PR they have also reduced link builders ability to manually manipulate search results with quality

links, how are people going to know what sites are high quality without high levels of due diligence? how will anyone be able to purchase high authority expiring domains when 99% of people are basing their purchase off PR alone both of the site they are buying and the PR of the inbound links of the sites linking to it? It all becomes unreliable information!

For me there is now a need to automate the domain assessment process beyond and possibly even excluding domain PR. A tool that could access all o

f the above mentioned points and filter out domains that dont meet my criteria would be ten times more valuable now than it was before and I would not be surprised if some of these come to the market over the coming months. Let me know if you’ve got one .