Recent Blog Posts
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The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
Apr 27 20099:04am EDT -
Sinking Animal Spirits
Apr 27 20098:04am EDT -
Counter-cyclical Urban Policy
Apr 26 200910:04am EDT -
Be Your Own Counterfeiter
Apr 26 20099:04am EDT -
Being Tim Geithner
Apr 25 200912:04pm EDT -
Notes From a Press Conference Naif
Apr 25 20099:04am EDT -
What Good is the News?
Apr 25 20098:04am EDT -
Stressful Enough
Apr 24 20092:04pm EDT -
Not Regretting the Pound
Apr 24 20091:04pm EDT -
Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
Non-Economic Questions of the Day
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
The Stress Test Blind Alley
Apr 24 20098:04am EDT -
Happy Hour
Apr 23 20099:04pm EDT -
Recovery Without Rebalancing
Apr 23 20096:04pm EDT -
The Shape of Your Recession
Apr 23 20095:04pm EDT
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The Google PageRank Massacre
Google is now a major – arguably the major – force driving news sites. As a result, sites' PageRank is utterly crucial for any business model. Right now, Google seems to be slashing the PageRank of a lot of blogs, and some news sites seem to have been caught up in the carnage, most notably that of the Washington Post, which has dropped to a PageRank of just 5 from a PageRank of 7 literally overnight.
A PageRank of 5 is atrocious, and essentially means that Washington Post news stories will not show up in any Google searches – certainly not on the first page, anyway, which is the only page that matters. PageRank is a little-understood and precious thing, and it can vary enormously even across the relatively small universe of authoritative news sites. Here's some examples:
msnbc.com: PR9
nytimes.com, wsj.com, ft.com: PR8
portfolio.com: PR 7
bloomberg.com: PR 6
washingtonpost.com, forbes.com: PR 5
No one outside Google really knows how these things are calculated: it's a very closely-kept secret. But clearly Forbes and the Washington Post are going to have some very unhappy website managers this morning, who will spend the next few weeks scrambling to get their old PageRank back.
Update: Fixing this could be as simple as inserting "nofollow" code into all the links to advertisers on the site, says Shawn Smith. Let's hope so, for the Washington Post's sake!
