The point is that Google is a ‘maker or breaker’ in the digital economy, and that going offside with Google’s terms of use could have had financial implications.

All this being a moot point now anyhow. Findlaw has ‘no-followed’ all of its advertising links, and Google has restored Findlaw’s Pagerank. Except for any fallout from FL customers, the matter is now resolved.

1. Google doesnt own findlaw.
2. Google has no authority to police anyones buying and selling of anything.

If I create a policy that states, no one can comment on blogs anymore and then someone does, Have I “caught them” doing illegal activity? Did I “uncover a scam”? Should I report these people? Of course not, who am I to make such a policy? I am no one…thats exactly who google is…no one. Call me when the district attorney makes it illegal to buy and sell links…then youll have a story.

So silly!

I’m an SEO and I just wanted to chime in here…First and foremost, great write-up Steve, I think you are spot on, for what it’s worth. The real damage here is going to be the heart ache that FindLaw will receive from it’s clients. I surely wouldn’t want to be fielding those calls or potential lawsuits from the lawyers that bought the link package. It’s going to be an administrative, legal and financial nightmare, not to mention severe hit to their brand and credibility in the space.

Google is more of a forgiving Internet God (atleast to large powerful sites) than it is a Condemning Internet God. It will restore value to FindLaw just as it did to BMW years ago when they were caught violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines…

When I comes to PageRank itself, I can only assume that Matt Cutts didn’t go in there specifically and decide to take the PR down from a 7 to a 5. Most likely he changed the “N” to a “Y” on whether FindLaw was a known seller of links and then the algorithm calculated the “5″ on it’s own. “5″ is still a very healthy PageRank. To say that PageRank is irrelevant is simply ridiculous, and highlights that you are simply frustrated with your organic results. Is it the all powerful identifier of whether or not a page will rank for a keyword? – well noway… But it is the one measurement that the most used search engine in the world uses to value your page or website. It is the first step to understanding what you are working with from a site audit perspective. If you are seeing it as irrelevant – then your basic SEO implementation is probably off (keyword research, site-structure, and internal linking structure).

Also, as much as I’m not a fan of Findlaw’s approach here, it’s these types of actions that might put Google off-side with anti trust legislators in the US.

Is PageRank irrelevant? I like to think of it as a rough gauge. And these days, probably not much more than that. Site trust is far more important in my eyes.

But, it shouldn’t matter. Nobody should be paying attention to page rank; you should be worrying about who is coming to your site, what they are doing, and why they are not doing what you want them to do.

Page rank is irrelevant.