Google PR updated last week. But this was no ordinary update. This last week Google did something that I’ve never seen before; they started killing PR on some links pages. Killing PR would have been bad enough, but they went even further by deindexing pages as well. On six sites that I manage the PR on link pages is gone.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about Google going after reciproal link trading, but I had never really seen any solid evidence until this last week. A lot of small business doing SEO are going to need to make some serious changes if they want to continue link trading.

However, it looks like authority sites with enough one way links were not affected by the update. If your site was not affected, I would take what happened to other sites as a warning and make some changes to your links pages.

Here are a few things that I would do right away.

1. 1. If possible take out any words that may give away your links pages ie. links, resources, partners etc.
2. 2. Try and kill patterns in your links pages. If you have the traditional link description, link description you will want to seriously consider contextual linking. I don’t think Google will ever go after contextual linking. If they did, they’d kill all the blogs out there.
3. 3. Another option is to not have “links” pages at all and just place link trades on “normal” pages in your site

Whatever you do don’t wait around, make the changes now. There is significant evidence that Google is trying to kill link trading. If they see obvious patterns your site will suffer.

• MSN Outshines Yahoo and Google on Recent Content
• Google giving weight to nofollow links in social networks
• Links pages are losing Page Rank (PR)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 9:34 am and is filed under Link Popularity, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.