Google PageRank Nuke Engaged

Posted on: October 25th, 2007 by Jeremy Schoemaker

Google Nuke

Matt and Adam flew the b-2 stealth bomber over problogger copyblogger, search engine roundtable, john chow and many other websites this week and deployed the PageRank nuke.

Its a pretty strategic nuke. It puts a hurting on their link sale value but seems to have no bearing in there actually search engine rankings. I still see these sites ranked very highly for terms.

I have to confess I do not even know what this sites pagerank is. I uninstalled seo tool bars a longtime ago. (i occasionally turn them back on).

So can someone tell me is this site, shoemoney.com still a pr9 ?

Post written by Jeremy Schoemaker

Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.

More about Jeremy at http://www.shoemoney.com!

Have You Read:

151 Comments. What Say You?

  1. Ryan Blakemore
    October 25, 2007 at 11:21 am

    I’m seeing a pagerank 6 for shoemoney.com

  2. morphy
    October 25, 2007 at 11:23 am

    I see a pr10

  3. Derek
    October 25, 2007 at 11:24 am

    You’ve been a PR6 for quite a while dude.

    My blog shitcanned to a PR2 from 4.

  4. katurday
    October 25, 2007 at 11:24 am

    I come up with a pagerank of 6 for shoemoney.com

  5. Derek
    October 25, 2007 at 11:25 am

    (though I was always surprised that it ranked pr4 in the first place lmao)

  6. Kenneth
    October 25, 2007 at 11:32 am

    yup…definitely a pagerank of 6

  7. Ginene
    October 25, 2007 at 11:38 am

    On prchecker.info it is a 6/10 and on urltrends.com it is a 6

  8. Online Cash Flow
    October 25, 2007 at 11:39 am

    Hmmmm… PR PR why is it so hard

  9. Kenneth
    October 25, 2007 at 11:40 am

    scary izit… google killed the rank silently.. goosassin..

  10. Paul
    October 25, 2007 at 11:40 am

    Sites with a PR of 3 or less have ranked well for competitive terms for a while. I’ve actually had a few sites see an increase in PR, yet the rankings have stayed the same or even dropped.

    Of course, while most people can agree it’s worhtless, many will still check their PR everyday. It’s one of the best implementations of SEO crack out there.

    >> shoemoney.com still a pr9 ?

    Sarcasm people… sarcasm.

  11. Joel Mueller
    October 25, 2007 at 11:48 am

    Go here: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

    I’m pretty sure shoemoney.com was never never never a PR9. lol

  12. ShoeMoney
    October 25, 2007 at 11:51 am

    we have a winner ;)

  13. Instant Community
    October 25, 2007 at 11:51 am

    Oh well, good luck with shoemoney.com

  14. Jason
    October 25, 2007 at 12:01 pm

    my dyslexia proves otherwise.

  15. Brent
    October 25, 2007 at 12:04 pm

    Surpised it took ‘em this long. It seemed for a while it was all talk and no show. I wonder if anyone who was selling links stopped after Matt’s post and avoided the bomb.

  16. LeGo
    October 25, 2007 at 12:09 pm

    and dellanave is a 4 now…

  17. Blog Contests
    October 25, 2007 at 12:09 pm

    Took long enough!

  18. Blog Contests
    October 25, 2007 at 12:10 pm

    I’m still PR0!

  19. Kenneth
    October 25, 2007 at 12:12 pm

    PR9 was crazy man..

  20. Kanwal
    October 25, 2007 at 12:12 pm

    So will this affect those sites that base their prices on PageRank? ahem*TLA*ahem

  21. Geiger
    October 25, 2007 at 12:18 pm

    Well if the SERPS are unchanged then the PR reported shows 2 things.

    1. People who use PR to judge how important a site is may think John Chow has less importance.
    2. TLA and other sites that charge according to PR make John’s links worth less while not actually affecting Google’s search results.

  22. Neon
    October 25, 2007 at 12:21 pm

    WOW… shoemoney.com got hit too! From PR 9 to … … hmm…. did jeremy read it invertedly when his toolbar is on at that time… :D

  23. Koen
    October 25, 2007 at 12:25 pm

    Your page rank is 0 in my toolbar…
    Oh, wait, the page isn’t loaded yet. It’s PR6.

    Anyway, I don’t see what this whole mess is about. Take problogger. He is, in my eyes, completely ethical, and trying to earn his income with making sites, and blogging, giving other people great tips. And then they lower his PR!?

  24. Kenneth
    October 25, 2007 at 12:28 pm

    Google was an absolute genius…………..

  25. SonicReducer
    October 25, 2007 at 12:34 pm

    I stopped using the toolbar too. There is a huge disconnect between PR and SE value. Based in the SERPs for posts on my blog, Google clearly thinks its an authority site, yet we have no PR. That makes no sense. But I’ll take good SERPs over a green bar any day, so nuke away.

  26. LeGo
    October 25, 2007 at 12:34 pm

    page does load slow… ;)

  27. blogstheme.com
    October 25, 2007 at 12:34 pm

    Man he was kidding with the PR9. He had a PR6 since few months back when I checked it :P . He said that so that people will comment all over the place!!! Nice strategy shoe.

  28. Daniel Simpson Day
    October 25, 2007 at 12:51 pm

    War’s over, man. Google dropped the big one

  29. JoeTech.com
    October 25, 2007 at 1:01 pm

    You’re at PR6 right now. I’ve seen a lot of sites take a hit.

  30. Credit Card Offers
    October 25, 2007 at 1:19 pm

    Your blog has a PR of 6. I dont think PR has a direct effect on your SE position. I tend to focus more on my SE position.

  31. ScreenRant.com
    October 25, 2007 at 1:19 pm

    Paul,

    You are the first person I have heard of on ANY of the blogs/forums that I follow that has seen an increase from this update!

    Vic

  32. CPA Affiliates
    October 25, 2007 at 1:28 pm

    seems like google is doing some pagerank house cleaning :) PR was just a value people used to gauge now it will start going back to being worthless.

  33. krillz
    October 25, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    hahah that was funny shoemoney, still a pr 9 :D
    Best comment I’ve seen so far.

  34. Ritu
    October 25, 2007 at 1:31 pm

    i dont want to check your PR cause if I do its just going to depress me even more, i wrote a post on pagerank as well, check it out

  35. P90X
    October 25, 2007 at 1:33 pm

    Dude.. you are PR6.. thats still pretty sick.. If you knew about SEO and what Page Rank is and does you can do well with other sites.. but you probably make a killing from you site just because other people see you as a PR 6.. keep doing what you are doing.. love your site!

  36. Ron
    October 25, 2007 at 1:33 pm

    No, PR6 is what I have for you.

  37. Rhys
    October 25, 2007 at 2:04 pm

    No, I’m a PR9 though.

    I’m blogging about this whole thing tomorrow. Are you excited? :P

  38. Derek
    October 25, 2007 at 2:11 pm

    LMFAO some of the comments are killing me :D

  39. Jeremy Steele
    October 25, 2007 at 2:20 pm

    Just looked at multiple data centers – all PR6 for shoemoney. http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank-dc.html

    I’m still sitting at PR3 – which doesn’t look as bad considering problogger is a PR4 now. It’s a bit weird – my google traffic has gone up quite a bit the past few days – so maybe google is tweaking how many good links you need to get to goto the next level?

  40. Blackysky
    October 25, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    lucky to him to stay at 6 .. I heard that google new algorithm will be even worst in the begging of 2008.. This is only the beta version…..
    They got a new plan for 2008 !!!! Internet will change …. the buzz continued

  41. ShoeMoney
    October 25, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    dillsmack went from a pr2 to a pr4

  42. Tim Spangler
    October 25, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    Because unless you sell links, it doesn’t really matter.

  43. natekapi
    October 25, 2007 at 2:35 pm

    ZOMFG WTF BBQ!!! SHOEMONEY.COM JUST DROPPED FROM A PR6 TO A PR6?!!!!

    ;)

  44. natekapi
    October 25, 2007 at 2:37 pm

    Dang it my A.D.D. got the best of me and I didn’t notice that I put PR6 instead of PR9….that’s what I get for trying to be funny I guess.

  45. cullen
    October 25, 2007 at 3:05 pm

    Page Rank is pointless (and stupid). I’ve got PR0’s ranking in the top 3 for some very competitive terms.

  46. Yogesh
    October 25, 2007 at 3:11 pm

    So did we actually had a PR update?

  47. jim
    October 25, 2007 at 3:18 pm

    hahaha i have NO idea what you just said

  48. Farmer
    October 25, 2007 at 3:18 pm

    “Is that Elvis?!” [swipes wallet] “Oh, never mind. Carry on.”

    ;)

    What is p-a-g-e r-a-n-k?

  49. jim
    October 25, 2007 at 3:19 pm

    What’s funny is that PR doesn’t matter to the folks who don’t sell text links

  50. jim
    October 25, 2007 at 3:19 pm

    Very true, if traffic is good, PR is meaningless

  51. semmy.name
    October 25, 2007 at 3:19 pm

    Your site shows at firefox plugin as pr6 but at http://www.prchecker.info/pagerank-checking-code.php as pr5 only.

    My blog http://www.semmy.name after having had a PR3 forever is now all of a sudden “unrated” – I have had http://www.semmy.name redirected to http://www.semmy.com for a while doing updates (but they took longer and after 6 weeks my PR all of a sudden disappeared!). It is really bizarre.

  52. jim
    October 25, 2007 at 3:20 pm

    Someone welcome him to the joke

  53. Derek
    October 25, 2007 at 3:48 pm

    Yeah, I’ve got a few half-assed sites that have gone from PR0 to unrated but are still indexed.

  54. Jonathan Volk
    October 25, 2007 at 3:59 pm

    :S… Someone needs to update their google toolbar.

  55. Jonathan Volk
    October 25, 2007 at 4:00 pm

    Welcome to the joke! ;)

    (Was that good enough?!)

  56. serge
    October 25, 2007 at 4:04 pm

    how do you find out a pagerank with out the google bar?

  57. simon
    October 25, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    There are many PR checker website! Just search on Google you will find tons of them.

  58. John M Weaver
    October 25, 2007 at 4:16 pm

    No need to freak out about something that has no value anyway. Quit complaining about your PR being a 0 when your pages indexed and traffic are fine. PageRank is going to no longer be vissible in the future because people like everyone on this comment list are addicted to what their page is ranked…Worry about usability and your site won’t get banned!

  59. Klaudio
    October 25, 2007 at 4:20 pm

    Im still unranked :(

  60. Milov Patel Blog
    October 25, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    Key Word is WAS

  61. King Jacob
    October 25, 2007 at 5:18 pm

    You arent alone klaudio

  62. King Jacob
    October 25, 2007 at 5:21 pm

    Im pretty sure dyslexic people read things backwards not upside down, You probally need to roll over.

  63. alain
    October 25, 2007 at 5:23 pm

    to be ranked take much time in google i think

  64. King Jacob
    October 25, 2007 at 5:24 pm

    They don mind ranking sites well for the internal PR that determines se placement they are just wary about rolling out an update to the toolbar pr cause they dont want people to sell links.

  65. Alex
    October 25, 2007 at 5:52 pm

    Yes Shoe. You are a PR9……………..minus 3

  66. nifty
    October 25, 2007 at 5:54 pm

    Shoe, from my experience PR doens’t matter that much on being found. It helps overcoming competitors on short tail keywords.
    The real deal is how fast your site gets indexed. If you have an high PR (4+), google indexes your new pages in minutes, otherwise it will take 1-2 days – that’s the real deal.
    It’s not really being a blog with rss, as someone says.
    Put yourself in their’s shoes. You have a zillion sites to index. Which one are you going to index first ?
    A matt cutt’s blog posts underline the very same concept.

  67. Nick Sullivan
    October 25, 2007 at 6:26 pm

    Who cares about PageRank. I’ve ranked top with sites in niche areas with PR1 above PR3 sites

    I don’t know why everyone is freaking out about it.

    People saying it affect link sale value. Well… if Google are getting rid of PR altogether which is what some are saying… then it will no longer be relevant anyway!

    We made it relevant and important, so the solution = to make it un-important to link value simply due to the fact it’s going (if it is)

  68. Darren
    October 25, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    “Its a pretty strategic nuke. It puts a hurting on their link sale value ”

    Strategic if I sold text link ads…. a bit dumb if I haven’t for months :-)

  69. Publishers Weblog
    October 25, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    your weblog has been PR6 for nearly a year now. So technically speaking you got nuked as well.

  70. Publishers Weblog
    October 25, 2007 at 6:41 pm

    He means they are planning something big and massive and they wont reveal it just as yet. To be honest the whole idea of pagerank had flaws and since the early 2000 most people tried to manipulate it with much success. Google is making sure that they can stay on top and change everything. They might remove it and replace it with something like PageRate or a SiteRate depeding on traffic/relevance and keyword density detected by their bots. I personlly happen to think that is what is gonna happen.

  71. geomark
    October 25, 2007 at 7:13 pm

    I see dead people. Better update my toolbar.

  72. great008
    October 25, 2007 at 7:47 pm

    Does my pr8 site count for anything???

  73. 賃貸 大阪
    October 25, 2007 at 7:54 pm

    Looks like you are still PR6 here. My site hasn’t changed either.

  74. Daniel
    October 25, 2007 at 7:55 pm

    PR0 and make $10k a month – suck it Google!

  75. PipholicDotCom
    October 25, 2007 at 9:46 pm

    who care with page rank :D

  76. uttoransen
    October 25, 2007 at 10:19 pm

    who cares, if any one is interested in buying links, only then he is going to take PR seriously, else not! So, for me PR is useless!

  77. Smart websites make money
    October 25, 2007 at 10:20 pm

    PR affects your rankings and ads value so we should care about it after all.

  78. Asim
    October 25, 2007 at 11:42 pm

    You are the lucky person who didn’t care about the SEO tool bar and don’t know about PR as it will give you nothing but to keep you worried about gaining high PR for your site.

    Your site is PR6, there are many other big sites went down from PR6 to PR4, many directories, blogs and sites showing drop in PR values. Only solution is not to care of this PR mania and concentrate upon content and other useful stuff on your sites.

  79. lyricsreg
    October 25, 2007 at 11:56 pm

    You would care about PR if you had all your traffic coming from search engines

  80. Wayne Liew
    October 26, 2007 at 12:00 am

    I don’t even have a PR. I am not banned but I am just at a PR N/A since my blog is new. This nuke bomb came and killed many SEO experts and webmasters but I am sure those with great contents will prevails at last.

    Contents is getting more and more important, especially in this Web 2.0. If you want to get good coverage for your site, contents will be the key.

  81. Wayne Liew
    October 26, 2007 at 12:02 am

    I guess most of us are in an unsure mode.

    First, we are all expecting an update and it didn’t come. We got through a long dry Page Rank patch and now when it finally comes, it comes twice and created euphoria on the Internet.

    All I can say is smart Google.

  82. SeanIM
    October 26, 2007 at 12:42 am

    all your BrinRanks are belong to us

  83. Affiliate Money Maker
    October 26, 2007 at 12:43 am

    My blog is unaffected – used to be PR0, still is PR0 – but still makes me money :D

  84. angad
    October 26, 2007 at 1:12 am

    google is sucking more than ever. you cannot even get quialty porn and warez search results

  85. Mr Review
    October 26, 2007 at 1:57 am

    Google sucked all the time.

    I think it’s time all webmasters turn their attention to Yahoo and MSN.
    Google is giving us a sh*t load of crap and we are trying to fight it.

    I truelly don’t think this penalty is due to paid links. It’s something far more sinister.
    It is very difficult even for Google to know whether you paid for a link from another website especially if the paid link is from relevant content.

    Maybe Google is hitting down on Reciprocal links?
    We have all done it and it’s still on our sites…maybe google is filtering it out, meaning that PR will obviously drop.

    My 2cents.

    Mr. Review

  86. Making The Money
    October 26, 2007 at 2:22 am

    Trust Rank here we come, page rank was flawed from day 1.

  87. Tekkmonk
    October 26, 2007 at 2:24 am

    I’m fairly new to this whole seo game.. tell me something. does anyone know if there was a specific reason for taking off the seo tool bars.

  88. arturo
    October 26, 2007 at 2:34 am

    you have no idea who jeremy is, do you? lol

  89. krillz
    October 26, 2007 at 4:16 am

    shoemoney you must have had the screen upside down when you saw that nine :D

  90. Seo Next
    October 26, 2007 at 4:45 am

    Dont sale links or post you sites in link exchange or text link ads.Google will drop your pr before u make money .

  91. Ades
    October 26, 2007 at 5:19 am

    I see a sign which says this blog does not neet pagerank… ;)

  92. Joshua Wexelbaum
    October 26, 2007 at 6:10 am

    Guys.. PageRank Is keyword dependent! (see the last post on my blog).

  93. morphy
    October 26, 2007 at 8:57 am

    Yeah you got it right
    Who gives a fish about the g toolbar anyways

  94. MyGoodFinds
    October 26, 2007 at 9:06 am

    Wow! I thought something was really weird going on. You’re a 6 dude. And here I am hoping to be at least a 5. :(

  95. Allyn Paul
    October 26, 2007 at 9:54 am

    My rank is Staff Sgt. Salute me, all.

  96. Justin Cook
    October 26, 2007 at 10:17 am

    Mine dropped from PR5 to PR3. This bites…

  97. ShoeMoney
    October 26, 2007 at 10:50 am

    makes my firefox load slower… i have like 5 seo related toolbars i disable or enable them all depending

  98. Neon
    October 26, 2007 at 11:26 am

    i dont think there is any hitting on reciprocal link exchange. in fact i feel that those doing reciprocal link exchange (not with directory) probably manage to maintain their rank.

  99. Mike Seiler
    October 26, 2007 at 11:38 am

    Your “post” is just a link to http://scobleizer.com — why not just do that here? Did you think everyone prefers to click twice?

  100. Derek
    October 26, 2007 at 12:01 pm

    lmao yeah that was one of the comments I just about pissed myself over

  101. Neon
    October 26, 2007 at 12:09 pm

    probably yes. you can see symptoms of PR rank.
    - unconsistent PR across datacenters.
    - pr changes of many sites.
    Just that this update knock alot more sites down.

  102. Ventrilo
    October 26, 2007 at 1:56 pm

    A message has definitely been sent to sites that sell paid links. I don’t think it will stop any of the major sites from doing it though, they’re still authority sites

  103. James
    October 26, 2007 at 2:19 pm

    Here’s your official PR11 button: http://blog-money-wiki.com/images/misc/pagerank11.gif

  104. LeadCritic
    October 26, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    lol, you took the words right out of my mouth.

  105. Luxbot
    October 26, 2007 at 6:29 pm

    We took a hit from 4 to 3. I guess Google is throwing a fit over the Microsoft/Facebook deal. Sigh… Love your blog btw!

  106. john
    October 26, 2007 at 8:01 pm

    Mine just went from 0 to 4 and I noticed that some of those big names who got wacked just got boosted back up. Something in the works.

  107. Amanda
    October 26, 2007 at 8:26 pm

    should we consider it a compliment when google nukes our page rank.. it means we’re doing something right to be considered a top player enough to have them nuke the sites page rank? i went from a pr 6 to a 4

  108. big
    October 27, 2007 at 4:00 am

    The Google paid link detection is really flawed: YouTube just dropped to PR3

  109. safesurfer
    October 27, 2007 at 7:48 am

    PageRank is not everything. As long as the calculation algorithm is not public, I’d rather spend my energies on more productive ventures than endless debates about whether a site is PR5 or 6. As long as it is useful to the consumer, it is a good site.

  110. Cameron Low
    October 27, 2007 at 8:26 am

    There are a few of us that actually gained PR :) FreelanceSwitch went from 5 to 6 and NxE went from 4 to 5. Perhaps Google is just picking on the big boys.

  111. Home based Business
    October 27, 2007 at 11:43 pm

    I think, you went down to 6. johnchow, i think, went down to 4. bad hair day for all of us. :D

  112. Tracy Robinson
    October 28, 2007 at 2:11 pm

    You still rank first in google, yahoo, and msn for shoemoney.com, now if somehwo you could monetize that, lol

  113. Amit
    October 30, 2007 at 7:49 pm

    This update was the most confusing update since some of my sites got a PR6 which had almost no backlinks. :|

  114. Joeychgo
    October 30, 2007 at 9:42 pm

    Its BS. I posted about this a few times already on http://www.joeychgo.com — I wont regurgitate – but basically – Google shot itself in the foot on this one

  115. interent phone
    November 1, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    Mine just went from 0 to 2 thank you google

  116. motorsportBABESau
    November 5, 2007 at 9:59 pm

    yay my PR went up to 3! I was only 1 PR behind problogger for a day. w00t!

  117. Tony Smith
    November 8, 2007 at 3:00 pm

    I’m still not even sure what page rank really is….

  118. adwordsa
    November 8, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    Ok Very Good rank real http://www.adwordsa.com sale rank ?

  119. Tim
    November 18, 2007 at 8:20 pm

    There will be another round. So be watch out!!

    –blog for dream–

  120. gizmo
    November 30, 2007 at 10:44 pm

    You’re a 4 now

  121. James B.
    December 4, 2007 at 4:54 pm

    I don’t even know what my site’s pagerank is.

  122. Life is Colourful
    December 13, 2007 at 9:20 pm

    Well as a matter of fact, the PR thing is playing a measure role in Internet marketing and everyone knows that… but it sucks to see Google pulling down PRs of websites for selling links.. I hate that :(

  123. iAnon
    December 14, 2007 at 12:28 pm

    I hope the buzz around the next update in 2008 will finally see an end to PR as it is a complete waste of time. It’s only benefit is for link sellers to guage the value of their links and now that this is seemingly gone, what is the point in keeping it?

    I also agree with a previous commentor, we should pay more attention to MSN and Yahoo and let Google continue with their manual manipulations without our support.

    Just my 2 cents.

  124. General knowledge
    December 17, 2007 at 10:35 am

    i see it Pr6 also. I dont know what is was before google updated it last time.

  125. Steve!
    December 23, 2007 at 8:17 am

    Nobody cares about PR anymore, its a bad metric to measure by.

  126. Real Lottery Winner
    January 13, 2008 at 2:38 pm

    I heard pagerank is useless anyway. But what do I know, I’m a newbie webmaster.

  127. Rodney
    January 13, 2008 at 3:19 pm

    I just see a PR of 6. If you had a 9 before that’s a pretty big drop. Has it hurt your traffic at all? Probably not.

  128. Karin
    January 27, 2008 at 5:46 pm

    I really, really trying to get a hang of this pagerank thing and now there is talk of changes. All of this can make a newbies head spiiiiiiiinn.

  129. Karin
    January 27, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    Just when you start to learn the game, they change the rules. Will the pagerank thing really change?

  130. RacerX
    February 3, 2008 at 2:56 am

    Wish I had a Bat-decoder ring to see what it meant now. Outside of Pay-Per-Post and link sales it doesn’t seem like much.

    Although It does seem that those who say it doesn’t matter are at PR0 like me!

  131. Flash Gamer
    February 13, 2008 at 10:04 am

    I see a PR 11 here, nice work.

  132. seo_lover
    February 15, 2008 at 12:38 am

    … how do you find-out a PR without the google tool bar…

    I am seeing your website Page Rank is 6 for shoemoney.com…

  133. Dave King
    February 16, 2008 at 2:08 pm

    Sorry Shoe, seems like your pagerank is -7 over here.

    -Dave

  134. beastmoon
    February 24, 2008 at 4:35 am

    so, pagerank is very important for website marketing, let the war begin……….

  135. Blends
    February 25, 2008 at 10:37 pm

    My blog pr drop to 0 from 3. Seem many website their pr are drop.

  136. Jesse
    March 13, 2008 at 12:12 pm

    It is kind of weird. Earlier, yesterday actually, I was on and it said Shoemoney.com to have a PR of 5. Now it dropped to 4. ..

  137. Nate Hill
    April 13, 2008 at 9:35 pm

    My blogs pagerank is still at 2 which is alright I suppose.

  138. Alice
    March 16, 2010 at 10:17 am

    always remember to refresh the page and the PR hopefully will turn green ;-)

Leave a Reply