Google PageRank To Be Reset

During a recent meeting with a Google engineer it was revealed to me that during November Google plan to make changes to four elements of their search engine and AdSense program in an attempt to thwart the increase of blackhat SEO, PR fraud and invalid AdSense clicks.

PageRank to be reset to zero and replaced

The infamous PageRank (PR) is going to be no more. All toolbar PR data will be reset to zero and PR will never be coming back (this is why we have been waiting so long for the update). This is very bad news for anyone who sells text links in order to make money.

This will be done in time for a mid November release of the Google Toolbar version 4.2 which will be used to roll out "VR" (visitor rating). Google VR™ will use a digg like system with a voting button on the toolbar to collect visitor ratings of the page and the VR will be displayed via a blue bar similar to the PR bar.

The VR value will be based on a number of factors like the ratio between visitors and votes and where your visitors come from (i.e referred from a site or a search engine), It will also take in to account how many people return to your site over time. I was assured that measures will be in place to stop competition rigging your VR by giving you too many negative votes.

Two clicks for AdSense

With the increase of click fraud and invalid, unintentional clicks, Google are bringing in a system designed to prevent someone clicking on an advert unless they actually want to. The system they are implementing will mean when someone clicks on your AdSense ads a box will appear telling them that the link they just clicked is a PPC advert and it will ask them if they want to visit the sponsored link. if they click "yes" you get paid, If they click "No" you don't get paid. It is speculated that this will reduce all AdSense earnings by 75% across the board but will increase the CPC.

No more link: data on the operator search

The link operator on Google search has long been an inaccurate way of seeing how many backlinks you have (another important factor when selling text links), But we don't have to worry about that anymore because Google are removing all backlink data from the search engine and from Google webmaster tools and analytics.

rel="nofollow" replaced by rel="dofollow"

Not to long ago Google came out with the great idea of using a rel="nofollow" attribute for links. What this done was tell the Google bot what links you didn't want it to follow from your site. This was a great way of stopping comment spam on blogs. Unfortunately not many people used the rel="nofollow" attribute and it kind of died out. So in november Google are replacing it with a rel="dofollow" attribute which will tell the Google bot what links you DO want it to follow. It will simply ignore all links with no attribute or the rel="nofollow" attribute, it will only crawl rel="dofollow" links. All links you have earned up to this point are now worthless.