It is that time again. The forums and blogs are all abuzz. Google is updating pagerank, and bloggers and webmasters everywhere are rejoicing… or groaning. I guess I should be in the second category. The pagerank of this blog has not changed, it was PR0 before and it is PR0 now. But my other blog, My CFO on the Go was a PR1 and now is a PR0. What changed? My page views went from 200 to over 4,000 per month. Backlinks from 3 to almost 1000. Alexa rank has gone from a 3 month average of 850,000 to 213,000. Yesterday’s Alexa was 82,000. So except for Google PageRank, every statistic for MyCFOontheGo shows dramatic improvement. Still the drop in PageRank isn’t really a surprise for me. You see, I made a few changes last month, and I knew that Big Daddy Google wouldn’t approve.
I began accepting paid posts, (which is fully disclosed) and I removed all the nofollow tags and made my blogs do-follow blogs. I am very happy with the changes. I am earning a little money, and the people that comment on my blog get a link back to their blog. It seems only fair.
But this does put me in a bit of a predicament. The advertisers who pay for posts are looking for high PR blogs. Page Rank is easy for them to check, and it is supposed to give an idea of how popular a web page is. If I had gotten my expected PR3 (according to the Iwebtool.com PR predictor) I would have plenty of advertisers wanting me to post for them. With a PR0, not so many. It becomes a catch 22. High pagerank causes more advertisers… which lowers page rank… which lowers advertisers… which raises pagerank. Do see the problem?
I have given it some thought and there are a few things I could do. I could remove all the paid posts, make all the links on my site no-follow, and then I could grovel back to Google and ask them to reconsider if I promise never to do it again. But I didn’t create my blogs for Google. They are for me, for my readers, and for my advertisers. I don’t want Google telling me what I can or cannot do on my blog. Plus, from my own experience, PageRank is not that great an indicator of readership. (See the chart later in the post) My other choice is to keep doing things the way I do now. Accept paid posts, while making sure they provide value to my readers as well as to my advertisers. Keep my links do-follow links, so when someone is takes the time to make a thoughtful comment on my blog I can be nice enough to give them a link.
I have decided to run a little experiment, just to see how important pagerank really is. I have four active blogs right now. Two that I am very active with, and two that really could use a little more attention. Here is a table showing the stats on those four sites right now.
Sorry, not sure what is going on here. Please scroll down for the table.
| Site | PageRank | 3 Month Alexa | 1 Week Alexa | 30 Day Page Views | BackLinks |
| MyCFOontheGo.com | 0 | 212,919 | 112,533 | 4048 | 981 |
| KatalinaMau.com | 0 | 680,441 | 314,639 | 1496 | 561 |
| NinjaSuccess.com | 2 | 851,145 | 568,953 | 1079 | 662 |
| GetRichGeek.com | 3 | 1,500,785 | 435,730 | 880 | 34 |
As you can see, the sites with the highest pagerank, actually have the lowest page views, and the lowest number of backlinks.
Which is why I believe that maybe Google PageRank isn’t the best indicator of how much traffic (quality or otherwise) a website gets.
Which leads into my experiment. From now, until the next pagerank update I am going to keep KatalinaMau.com and MyCFOontheGo.com the way they are. The way I want them to be. But for NinjaSuccess.com and GetRichGeek.com I am going to comply with Googles requirements. No paid posts and nofollow links. It will be interesting to see what happens and I’ll report back to you after the next PR update.
Do you have a blog or a website and you think your PR isn’t what it should be? I am planning on putting together a directory of quality sites with traffic, and low or no pagerank. If that sounds like your site, leave a comment with your stats. If it all checks out I’ll add you to the directory as time permits.
Yeah, I think most people are beginning to get it with Google. We all want to make money on-line. I think Google made a mistake with this one. I have been PR0 since October 2007. But, happily I get some great traffic numbers.
Page Rank – PR0
3 Month Alexa – 106,620
1 Week Alexa – 76,935
30 day Page Views – 40,707
Sites Linking in – Yahoo – 1,940
I wasn’t sure how you were measuring sites linking in.
I knew I wasn’t the only one!
I use iwebtool.com for many of my statistics.
http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
It is a catch 22 situation.
I was slashed from 3 to 0 (not this time but on Jan). Some of the people advised me to delete my paid posts and put no-follow to the new paid posts, submit to google and no more paid posts.
Until now, I have not done anything yet.
After rank 0, I did not get as many paid posts from PPP as I used to be. My income was cut a whole lot.
I have not blog one way or another (for/against) but I read a lot of bloggers emotions and comments.
From my business experience, I think Google intend to wipe out all adv. business and I suspect they might come up with their own paid post companies.
I wonder bloggers who have low page rank would get company who would be interested to adv. with them ? (of course famous blogger like John Chow already established himself in the blogosphere, how about the new ones ? , that is what I want to know).
Thank you for visiting my blog and I enjoy your blogs.
Cheers
Jamy
jamy’s last blog post..Gold, gasoline and history.
On on of my older, previously successful but now retired blogs, I had the same problem. Not accepting paid posts / links lets you keep your page rank. With the high PR, advertisers are knocking on your door, only to be turned away empty handed… but as soon as you turn to the dark side and accept these offers, Google drops the hammer. It’s awful to have to sneak around behind G’s back, when you’d rather be open and up front about everything… but such is the way of the internet in 08 I suppose.
Llama Money’s last blog post..First Stock Purchases
i too do not look for PR of my sites much … wat matters is TRAFFIC 😉
I just keep on getting quality backlinks to my sites n blogs. But i wud like to have PR 0 if i get this much good traffic.
Yeah Page rank is not everything.