Google’s Matt Cutts: “Why did our PageRank go down?”
Posted by on August 28, 2012 12:37 PMGoogle’s lead of search spam, Matt Cutts, wrote a blog post named “Why did our PageRank go down?”
The post is a reminder to webmasters that selling links that pass PageRank can lead to a Google penalty.
Matt said “PageRank drops by 30-50%” typically are due to “selling links that pass PageRank.” Matt explained that they detected links labeled “sponsored that passed PageRank.” He added that Google “received an outside spam report about your site” with details on different paid links on other sections of the web site.
Once the site removes the paid links or makes sure they do not pass any PageRank, Matt said, you should submit a “reconsideration request” to remove the manual penalty.
