On reading of a friend’s (WordPress.com hosted) blog yesterday and then flicking into one of their WordPress system tags we saw the screen light up in the familiar pink of the nofollow.
..Now it has been a while since we looked at the WP system, but we are fairly sure that it didn’t use to look like this, did it?
Andy beard wrote about wordpress being a big linkfarm back in 2006, and the effective unfair advantage that it’s hosted users receive, in some cases with prepostorously high Pageranks (and therefore enhanced SERPs) of PR6 and PR7 for blogs linked to almost entirely internally in the WordPress.com system, ie hardly any “real” ie external IBLs at all, so it definitely was the case these were live links back then.
Looking at the linkscanner also shows that blog.wordpress.com blogs are now all showing nofollow on the Tag links.
Please correct us if this is wrong, but otherwise it looks like that game’s now over, and presumably we can expect to see these WordPress SEO‘d blogs losing Pagerank by the bucket load now?
It’s only fair, Google’s blogspot system doesn’t work like that, so it will be interesting to see the effects of their users having to accrue their pagerank fairly like everybody else.
The Great “Pagerank Crunch” of 2008 ..followed by the great WordPress SERP Depression?
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A lot of bloggers use do follow to encourage people to comment and share their opinions. This nofollow trends doesnt seem to be too good an idea.
Good thing there’s just been a PR update – these people have about three month’s grace before their fall!
Tamara – Incorrect – they will have a higher PR displayed on their blog for 3 months, but google is constantly re-calculating PR in the background and only publishes numbers every three months, so its highly unlikely they will hold this PR for 3 months.
I stand corrected – thank you!
I believe this change will harm greatly all WordPress bloggers, who will be even more willing of migrating to their own domain….good opportunities for new services….
hola Rome. ..am sure youre right. ..it’s good of WP to run a large public experiment like this so we can really see the true effect of PR in the SERP though.
wonder why they didn’t announce it themselves though?
RE:: Google’s blogspot system doesn’t work like that
No, but google does give a lot of favoritism to its own blog platform so how is that fair either? This PR stuff is getting to be like taxes. We want to make it fair but could end up making things very complicated.
My blog at wordpess has lose traffic for 40% .
My page rank was 5 now is 1
it’s unfair.
hola amigo
yes we’ve seen drastic drops across quite a few WP hosted blogs of friends etc, it looks like it’s definitely affecting things.
but as for unfair, some would say the PR you originally had was unfair because it wasnt generated by real external links?
That sucks – I just created six WordPress blogs thinking I could get some free dofollow links out of them, make my first comment and am hit with red right out of the box. Great.