I have a game site http://www.gamesonline4free.net on which I do lots of experiments. It currently has a PageRank of 0 due to Google’s penalizing it. Here is the reason: 6 months ago it was a PR4 but that was also the time that I decided to experiment with the Digital Point CO-OP network and the TNX network. DP CO-OP is essentially a link exchange network that serves links on your site and serves your backlinks in other’s sites. TNX is more like a paid links network.
Both of them ended up serving some very unrelated links (financial links in a game site do look fishy don’t you think ?). Google caught this and on the next PR update (sometime around January 2008) lowered the PR to 2 just to warn me. I only realized that was a warning when on the following update (which was probably in March ??) the PR dropped to 0. That is when I realized that google was trying to tell me something and as I was not too fond of the financial links myself decided to get rid of DP CO-OP at first. The next update in the beginning of May did not see any improvement and thus I got rid of TNX links as well. Hopefully by next update the right PR will be restored.
Mind you, PR lowering was the only penalty. As for google traffic and rankings (SERPs) things have been improving day by day. The google traffic has steadily been growing to an average of 900 visitors a day with the majority comming from the search for free online games. The site is usually found in between positions 9 - 26 in the results pages for that term. 6 months ago it was only getting an average of 300 visitors per day from google and the site was below the 45th position for free online games.
Why PR0 is to be avoided
A few days ago I decided to do some more link exchanged for it and visited some of my favorite webmaster forums to make a post to find some willing webmasters. I explained all the circuimstances that led to PR0 (not in as much detail) and also explained the current favorable positions in google. To my surprise most webmasters were not willing to exchange with me. They were afraid that their site will be penalized and did tell me so.
Are their fears justified ?
Triplefun.net A long term link exchange partner has not been penalized (still a PR4) and we both get to send to each other about 50-100 visitors each month.
With this experimental site and other observations I have concluded that PR does not affect rankings which is the desired result and that webmasters willing to exchange based on PR alone are not right.
Will you link exchange with such a site ?
What is your take on PR and how it affects SERPs ?
I am REALLY interested to find out what you ALL think.
15 responses so far ↓
1 Michele // May 29, 2008 at 11:06 pm
I link to PR zero sites all the time on many of my sites. What’s important to me is whether or not someone visiting my site would find the other site useful. To me, it’s much more important if the site is something more than a collection of stolen and/or poorly written spider-bait articles than it is if they have a bit of PR or not.
It’s long past time for Google to abandon this failed experiment of theirs and find a less manipulatable and arbitrary way of evaluating websites.
2 Igor // May 31, 2008 at 9:33 am
I link to PR 0 sites and many PR 0 sites link to me.
The content is importend, not thr PR.
igor
3 hsfh2 // Jun 4, 2008 at 2:51 am
I don’t do reciprocal links.
I think I got kicked off the index for it as well.
4 OSS Sinav Tercih // Jun 8, 2008 at 2:11 am
Getting penalized to PR0 makes you feel like having a bad reputation on online world like crime guilties
5 dd // Jun 9, 2008 at 5:18 pm
PR is only 1 factor . Content links etc .
6 John Lessnau // Jun 13, 2008 at 2:53 am
TNX is bad news. Only use them if you have nothing to lose. Like if your already sandboxed and going nowhere and willing to try anything.
7 Raman // Jun 24, 2008 at 7:22 pm
nice info was thinking of giving a try to TNX.
8 OsBTI // Jun 27, 2008 at 6:00 am
yeah wouldnt go near something like TNX, its all very shady.
Kinda like a swimming pool site with links to UK fireplaces haha.
9 Maxsearch // Jul 7, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Having PR of 0 is fine for new site. But only an issue if your going backwards
10 eric // Jul 11, 2008 at 2:10 am
I have s ite that was hit buy a bunch of porn spammers and scammers and it went from PR6 to PR0 in a week. I cleaned up the mess but the site has never recovered. I have alos banned registrations from ny one with a free e-maill like gmail and ymail.
11 sezerbiyam // Jul 27, 2008 at 3:30 pm
HI i need your help i really want to create my own website/web page but i dont know how to go about doing it so can you please help me out
12 GiorgosK // Jul 27, 2008 at 3:52 pm
What kind of help ??
I see you already have a site !!
Learn how to take care of that and time and practice will teach you !!!
13 atiq.zia // Jul 31, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Well, I had a PR0 and for a few key terms one of my site was above than PR3 even PR4 sites. It might be due to fact of more back-links for me for that keyword.
I was researching on keywords, and though i am not playing on it, but if you may get top 5 position for above mentioned keyword “Free game…” you will require to a lot of bandwidth
14 dhunt // Aug 10, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Some very interestong Points on PR…
15 drraman // Aug 11, 2008 at 8:32 pm
donno why Google’s against selling links.
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