Tom Doyle

For the past few months, my web design company has been in the process of dropping our 2bscene.net domain name in favour of our 2bscene.ie domain name.

It has caused major issues with our rankings for our main keyphrases, the site has basically dropped to page 3 or 4 for most phrases. We knew it was going to effect us, but weren’t entirely sure just how much.

One thing I really wanted to keep was our Google PageRank of 7. It took a lot of time and effort to build this up. Taking advice from peers and my own knowledge, I thought my best plan of action was to use a 301 redirect on my old domain, in the hope it wold transfer over all the weight. That has happened and for months, the .net domain still had a PR of 7 until just the other day. Now my main .ie domain and the .net domain, report a PageRank of 4.

I beginning to wonder now if it’s something else that could be an issue. Then I came across this post the other day. http://valleywag.com/tech/search/is-google-punishing-dirty-linkwhores-314513.php

Basically these fairly popular sites have also lost their high PR.

• The Washington Post PR7 to PR5
• Statcounter.com – PR10 to PR6
• Forbes PR7 to PR5
• Chicago Sun-Times PR7 to PR5
• San Francisco Chronicle PR7 to PR5
• Autoblog PR6 to PR4
• Engadget PR7 to PR5
• ProBlogger PR6 to PR4
• Copyblogger PR6 to PR4
• Joystiq PR6 to PR4
• TUAW PR6 to PR4
• Search Engine Journal PR7 to PR4
• Search Engine Roundtable PR7 to PR4
• The Blog Herald PR6 to PR4

So what is Google up to? Are they penalising these websites and possibly my own?

Are these cases results of the clamp down on paid links that Google talked about for so long?

Whatever they are doing is a very dangerous act in terms of the knock-on effects it could have. How are they distinguishing what links are paid for and what links are genuine?

I guess only time will tell.