Backlink/PR update?

[Sapphire]

All of my sites are reporting more backlinks than they had a few days ago, and the PR on 3 of them has gone up 1-2 numbers. And if you go to McDar or SEOchat, you can see the datacenters are not all in agreement.

Is this a PR update, or just some sort of normal process? My PR and backlinks had been steady on all sites ever since the last PR update - no change at all. Now they're suddenly all changing, so that made me think it's an update of sorts, possibly just a minor one...?

[DaveN]

this is an update !! .. lol seeing lots of sites hand banned and backlink clusters been killed

[sootledir]

There was definitely a backlink update.

[rustybrick]

This is correct, check your backlinks at http://72.14.207.104/ for example, compared to google.com

[DaveN]

see lots of scaper backlinks showing up ... not happy about that, I bet some sites will get burnt badly due to this..

DaveN

[sootledir]

Google's inability to deal with the "Rise of the Scraper Sites" is truly unbelievable.

I mean, really, almost all scrapers follow a very similar pattern in site design. Add to that the fact they're all in the AdSense program and you really have to wonder how hard anyone is trying to stop these?

[Marketing Guy]

Ive wondered a lot why Google just doens't boot these people from Adsense - Im pretty sure they get loads of spam reports each day pointing out parts of scraper networks. I've seen people have a site banned and still be running the same Adsense account on other sites.

One random thought I had was that Google's setup is fairly similar to a scraper site - extracts from other sites (without asking permission first!) to attract people to their site, funded by advertising revenue on these listings... Perhaps there's a legal barrier (or hesitation) to booting people that do the same from Adsense? Unlikely though - just a thought.

Re: Back links - I'm seeing a loss of some links on some DC's (about 10%), but my lead KW position has improved (from 8 to 5) within a very competitive market (140 million) which has surprisingly little spam. Perhaps industries with notoriously large amounts of spam will see more impact?

MG

[Sapphire]

I've noticed that the relevance of the search strings that bring people to my sites has improved recently. One site in particular had a lot of irrelevant traffic in April, but that changed drastically in May. So I had a bit less traffic, but it was better targeted, which suits me fine.

[shaneq]

This update for backlinks or PR has not reached the UK??