Comments on: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 11:31:24 +0000

By: meDuckie

meDuckie — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 11:15:00 +0000

Hi there, Andy .. I note in the screenshot above you have the Page rank Tool and the Alexa Tool together, how were you able to achieve this, please?

Or is this a Firefox add-on

My F-secure program will funnily enough not allow me even to download the Alexa Toolbar for IE .. now that is saying something .. lol

By: multippt

multippt — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 12:08:43 +0000

Well, at least the quick restoration in PageRank shows that Google is fast enough to respond to reconsideration requests.

By: Sergey Rusak

Sergey Rusak — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 20:17:55 +0000

I just checked and their Pagerank is 7 (Internet Explorer)

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:50:27 +0000

Great to hear, Gabe — but wow, something from back in 2006 finally shows as kicking in. Wow. Remember, you’ve probably been prevented from passing link love to people for all this time. It’s just that no one publicly could tell that until the penalty.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 09:06:22 +0000

Gabe good to hear it was resolved. Having a story hanging on the front page of Techmeme might have nudged them to take action a little quicker, or maybe Danny nudging them about it on Twitter.

So much for human verification, and possibly a 2 stage process over a period of time just in case of accidental errors.

By: Gabe

Gabe — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 08:59:35 +0000

Thanks for the update Andy. I was contacted by…someone from Google, and much of what was speculated was confirmed. Techmeme was dinged for those links, but should not have been given the disallowed redirects. Google evidently noticed the paid links during the week in 2006 when I did NOT have /goto disallowed, i.e. during the week Techmeme did pass PageRank (whatever that means :-) ). Google resolved to rectify.

I still disagree with Google’s approach, but I should note I was treated exceptionally well yesterday. About as good as anyone could expect. I didn’t even have to submit a reconsideration thingy, whatever that is.

By: beth in Greensboro

beth in Greensboro — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:08:54 +0000

I’ve been trying to get my brain wrapped around the toolbar update for sometime now…. I’ve never sold links, nor has anyone that I know of in my immediate web community. My assumption is the perceived PageRank does have something to do with 301 redirects though… although I haven’t put my finger on it… But some of my other blogger acquaintances never have used a 301… So I’m not sure.

By: Patrick Grote

Patrick Grote — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:22:22 +0000

One day another search engine will come along with the vaunted “algos” google once claimed to have. My feeling is if you were to peer behind the curtain, so to speak, you would see a google index process with much more wire and spackle than intelligent automation.

The nofollow tag was a perfect mind twist that everyone readily jumped on to avoid comment spam. Hardly anyone at the time considered the ramifications of making everything nofollow. :)

When the agent of record for the internet needs to rely on a human tag to help it do the job, well, we’re all in trouble.

By: Techmeme, web publishing, and Google PageRank ¦ Online Media Cultist

Techmeme, web publishing, and Google PageRank ¦ Online Media Cultist — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 03:07:38 +0000

[...] There’s a great article by Andy Beard and fascinating subsequent conversation between Beard and TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera here. [...]