What do you think about the latest PR Update?

I’m wondering what do you think about Google’s latest PR Update. Expected in August, it came in October and with lots of changes. The motto of this update was "Let’s take the paid links down".  Thus many sites and blogs that sold/bought links were hit hardly. Here’s how i see it.

Mot of the paid directories had their PRs reduced by 2-4 points. The only ones that seem to have escaped yet are Yahoo Directory, Business, Jayde and BOTW. All of them are old and established domains though. The other were hit, thus all the links from them lost a lot of their weight.

On the other side, there are the blogs that sell/used to sell links. They were hit too. Johnchow and Engadget can be found in the top of the list.

But what are the effects of these penalties. Let’s see. Directories will loose most of their clients, because their links are not worthy anymore and because people will think twice before buying a link, knowing they pay for something that will possibly do them more wrong than good. Blogs will also not be able to sell their links, for the same reasons mentioned above.

These changes attract major penalties in SERPs. Numerous examples can be found on forums and blogs. It’s not because your blogs’ PRs were reduced, it’s because the total link weight getting in your site has diminished. So, if the most important part of your link building campaign consists in paid links… then… you’re screwed(Expect you Google traffic to drop drastically).

In the end, i tend to agree with Google on these PR penalties. They stated for so long the importance of naturalness in their algorithm and it was expected to do something against paid links. Of course, for us, SEO developers, it will be a lot harder now to raise a certain site in SERPs…

What do you think about Google’s move? Do you agree with it or not? Feel free to post your comments bellow.

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