Google Hits the Big Boys with PageRank Penalties for Selling Links

This has been a fascinating day for PageRank-watchers, link-buyers and link-sellers. Google has lowered PageRank (their measure of the amount and quality of inbound link that a site has) for a number of very high-profile sites such as autoblog.com, engadget.com, forbes.com and many more.

I liked Andy Beard's report on this story. Darn, should I add a nofollow to that link? Yeah, I better, just to be on the safe side, he admits he was dinged in the latest PageRank hit and Google tells us not to associate with "bad neighborhoods"!

I'm happy about this because it's mighty hard to compete against sites who are spending thousands of dollars a month on paid links using service such as Text-Link-Ads, TextLinkBrokers, etc. This type of gaming of the system does not result in the most relevant search results for the searcher. Google will only continue its battle and keep stepping it up a notch to get reduce gaming of PageRank (and the resulting gaming of search engine rankings). Who wants to fight the Kings of All Search? Not me!

From the SMX Social Media NYC 2007 Conference

This is where I am now. Lots of great information on social media marketing. One thing I'm getting is a sense for the amount of time that has to be dedicated when embarking on a social media marketing campaign.

Game 1 of the 2007 ALDS Red Sox vs Angels - Great Seats!

It was fun to sit in row 8 at this game and watch Beckett pitch a shutout! It was a short game - 2.5 hours I think. Great warm weather in early October made it even better. Tonight we'll see if LA can redeem themselves.