Donna wrote a piece today entitled, “Less PageRank Floating Around In SEO Niche“. The post was based around a comment Matt Cutts made on SEOmoz having to do with the fact that certain sites seeing lower PageRank had to do with the fact that “there?s less PageRank flowing around in some areas (e.g. search and SEO)” and not that those sites had been penalized. Her conclusion from Matt’s statement is that she thinks most people were wrong about the recent visible PageRank penalties being just visible, and that the the penalties were probably also behind there being “less PageRank” in the SEO niche.

Personally, I think her conclusion involves a glaring oversight. Her logic, as far as I can tell:

  1. If the visible PageRank was more than just visible, then it would affect the amount of PageRank to go around in the SEO niche (this is true)
  2. Matt Cutts stated there is less PageRank to go around in the SEO niche (this is true)
  3. The PageRank penalties were more than just visible (this is a guess, and doesn’t logically follow one from the other)

This is what I think she missed:

  1. If there was a mass panic, and a huge number of people quit selling links fearing a penalty from Google, then it would affect the amount of PageRank to go around in the SEO niche (this is true)
  2. Matt Cutts stated there is less PageRank to go around in the SEO niche (this is true)
  3. A mass panic did follow the visible PageRank penalties (this is not a guess, this happened, and could easily explain the loss of PageRank flow Matt mentioned)

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