Retaining the Page Rank you have earned

The online world is rife with rumors that Google has been downgrading PR of the sites who have been selling links or doing paid reviews and selling links. Google page rank is a rating that Google assigns a site as a measure of importance that site has on the Net.

Though Google, in various releases, has indicated the formula for calculating the page rank, yet it remains shrouded in a mystery in the sense that a webmaster is able to reasonably guess it but not be very sure about it.

How much this page rank helps in getting traffic is also debatable, but two things are certain; one; that given all things same (which never are) a site with higher page rank would rank higher than other; and second; page rank does help in monetizing a site better whether by sale of links or otherwise valuation of a site.

Honestly; this is a belated step by Google. PR of a site is a vote on that site by others on the net; i.e. how many times that sites or page has been referred to by others. Buying a ‘vote’ through paid link does defeat this. The recent move by Google is a warning that your site will go down even further if you continue to sell links. People who heavily used PR to monetize their site through links sales to shady sites stand to lose heavily.

Matts Cutts responded to these concerns in a recent interview where he stated that Google understands that people would try to game any successful system be it amazon, Google, wikipedia or others, but he continued to add that webmasters need to give link only to reputed sites; thereby meaning links for money is not something that Google would appreciate.

The whole issue is people have built up businesses centered around Page Rank, who are now upset with Google change of policy and pulling the plug. All the Google has really done is finally made it more visible that many sites selling PageRank weren’t actually passing along credit at all.

Then what is the solution out of this webmaster’s dilemma of making money too and not losing page rank too? After all Google is most respected company on the net and its PR carries lot of weight and prestige. Even if it does not play role in getting traffic, out of two options of doing business with a company; one is a Google PR2 site and the other is a Google PR8 site - which one would you choose to do business with? Honestly?

To my mid, the only way out of not losing page rank because of sale of links is to keep updated the site with more and more content so that the “credit outflow” because of sale of links is compensated with fresh content.

On an average, make it a practice to reinvest one third of your income through link sales into getting fresh content.

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