Page Rank

Page rankings have been recently reassessed so I was looking for a page rank checking utility on line. Of course, for the paid blogger, page rank can be an important factor. A year or so ago, I was surprised to find that my page rank had come back (The history of my page rank has taken up quite a few posts on this blog..).
I checked my rankings again here: http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/, and am delighted to find that my PR has now risen to 2... I am sharing this link because most PR checking utilities make you fill in a captcha for every submission - the link above has a captcha, but they allow you to submit 20 URL's in one go - more than enough for me to check all of my domains.
I have not really paid so much attention to PR since Google started punishing all paid bloggers, and still find it ironic that Google doesn't like paid posts, but happily pays us to host Adsense on our sites. However some advertisers will still specify a minimum PR when they are looking for paid posts, so PR still has a value - I refuse to make any concessions to Google's preferences, but if they are happy to award me a ranking, I am happy to take it..

Google Panda update

You may have heard something of the fuss surrounding the latest Google ranking update, you may have even seen it's effects (especially if you write on one of those sites that pay you to write 'articles').
Google have seen fit to say quite a lot about the criteria they have used for changing the rankings of some sites, although as usual they will not be specific. To save you from having to sift through all the quotes an comments - it all boils down to one thing:

It's all about CONTENT.

Google is 'de-ranking' what it considers low quality or 'shallow' content, content that adds nothing new, or even repeats content found elsewhere - it's just not going to tell you how it evaluates a site.
In short, if you are writing useful, insightful original content you have nothing to be worried about. Nevertheless, this updates threatens the 'paid to' world as it is targeting sites that have thousands of individual writers adding their own content on a daily basis.

SEO plug-in

I have been using Google Chrome recently, and although I am not really one to get loaded up with plug-ins, I starting using two straight away. The first plug-in I installed was a googlemail plug-in which is very useful. The googlemail plug-in lets you know by sounding an alarm when mail arrives, indicating how many unread emails are in your inbox, and even popping up a preview of the mail when it arrives.
The next plug-in I discovered was an SEO plug-in - this gives an SEO overview of the currently-displayed page. The overview includes Google PageRank, backlinks for Google, Yahoo and others, Technorati and alexa rankings, whether the site is in DMOZ etc... I have found this plug-in to be extremely useful for overviewing my own sites, and also those of others that compete for the same keywords and markets.

Similar stories:
Google Chrome
PageRank

Pagerank for Munny4Hunny

I did not quite believe my eyes the other day when trying out the Google Chrome SEO plug-in - I have been using this to run quick tests on my sites. the SEO plug in showed a pagerank of 1 for this blog - it has been a long long time since I have had any PR at all, so at first I was a bit skeptical. Since then I have tried a pagerank checker: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php and sure enough, that also says I have regained pagerank on this blog...

I have not been pursuing PR at all for quite a while, so it is quite a pleasant surprise to see it return even though I doubt whether it makes any real difference except for prospective advertisers. I have long begun to disregard PR as having any real value, especially as I have (in other experiments) been able to have sites ranked very highly (ie. up to position 1 locally and position 2 globally) for keywords on sites that have no PR whatsoever. The main focus of SEO has to be search position alone, and if you can get search position without PR, why bother going to the trouble of trying to gain PR?

As to the return of PR, I can only surmise that finally the effects of all the viral linking between blogs has finally faded away to nothing. Out of curiosity I have been checking Technorati ranks too (as this is included on the Google Chrome SEO plug-in). I used to have a huge 'authority' ranking for Technorati due entirely to viral links, but on all my blogs but one, I now have an authority of 1 - My creditcruncher blog has authority of 105 for some reason, but this also was something of a surprise, and Technorati no longer seem to show you the links that endorse your 'authority'...

It's interesting how PR and Technorati 'authority' were two things that drove my blog a few years ago, but now, they are merely incidental. what it comes down to is this:
Just do your thing the way you want to do it, follow your own goals rather than following the crowd - at least that way, if you don't make a breaktrhough, you will be at least doing what you want. Following the crowd however, is never going to result in individual success.

Associated links:
Looking for PageRank
PageRank explained
Be yourself

Still looking for PageRank?

I am starting to come round to the conclusion that PR is a bit of a self-fulfilling dream... after all, what is it's value?
Does it get you SERP (search engine results position)? seemingly not as I have several sites with little or no PR that achieve first-page results for specific targeted key-words.
Many of us were slave to PR when we started blogging, and the weeping could be heard from afar when Google slapped us all for trying to 'game' PR with viral schemes. Some desperately hung on, determined to show their contrite hearts to Daddy Google by refusing paid posts and removing 'do follow' from their blogs.
Did it make any difference? Did traffic cease or did our sites disappear from the search results? Maybe there were some short-term effects here and there, maybe Google has learned some lessons and maybe there is not so much money being thrown at paid bloggers, but not an awful lot has really changed.
I am promoting a new site at the moment, and have concentrated almost exclusively on 'on-page' optimisation - the type of SEO that doesn't rely on outside links and therefore is not affected by PR. My conclusions are that you can certainly get ranked on page 1 without PR- and most of the time, I am only held off the top-spot by Wikipedia... So I leave you with this... What is the value of PageRank?
And my answer is that you really only need to think about it if you are competing for a very highly sought after keyword. You may easily get SERP for a cleverly thought out associated phrase with virtually no 'off-page' optimisation at all. Of course, if many of those who sponsored posts took this view, they would stop paying for links except for those sickeningly 'popular' recurring promotions (I leave the themes of these to your imagination), so I hope sponsors will ignore my views and continue to send interesting and varied opportunities.

PageRank punishment

I have noticed that in the last week or so, some of my newer blogs that had PR, have been slapped presumably for carrying PPP or associated paid to blog posts. I have only done a few paid posts on these blogs but it seems that these few posts have had an effect on PageRank.
I had two blogs which had started to build up PR, one was ranked 2, the other 1 - these have lost a ranking point each. Not a huge problem you would have thought except that once more the opportunities that I was getting for these blogs have depleted from an average offering of between 8-12 posts each time I logged into PPP, (usually about four actually available) to currently about 4 (one of which is available). So ironically, it is the taking part in PPP which is lessening the opportunities I am offered.

There are doubtless several ways in which Google can 'detect' PPP opps, firstly there is the tinyURL link that you sometimes have to use - these could easily be sniffed out by Google. then there is the fact that the jobs are so specific with the link requirements, that using the 'link:' search function would throw up all the links that had been put on the internet in the duration of the opp on PPP. Who's to say that there are not Google employees with accounts at PPP using the information from each oppotunity to search for paid bloggers??
The upshot is that the more PPP you do the less likely you will be able to do PPP again because your PR will come down and opps will dry up.

No such worries with PayU2Blog thankfully as the jobs keep coming regardless of PR - there was a bit of a rush before Christmas, and it has been quiet since, but I noticed a few more PU2B opps today so I will have something to do at the weekend...

PageRank explained?

Each time I do about about Google and/or PageRank, I feel as though I have not gone into enough depth. I cannot gauge how much or how little a reader might already know, and it seems to me, with the confusion surrounding these two mystical entities, that some background might be helpful...
Pagerank was originally developed at Stanford University by Larry Page later aided by Sergey Brin. Most people think (myself included) on first hearing the term, that the 'page' part of it refers to a web page whereas in fact this refers to it's originator.
The concept behind pagerank is to predict the likelihood of a random click on an internet link finding a specific URL. This is determined by the amount of links pointing to the specific URL, and also the perceived 'quality' of that link. The point of the exercise was to develop a search engine, and Google emerged from this project in 1998.
Pagerank 'compares' pages on the worldwide web, so ranking is always relative, rather than absolute, ranking is dynamic changing each time new pages are added to the web or new links are added to pages.
Via search 'bots' (small programs 'sent' out to crawl the web), a link can be examined and the originator page of that link is also assessed. If the originator page is weighted under the Pagerank system, the page it points to benefits from that weighting. All links are taken into account and a value is eventually assigned between 0 and 10. The hysteresis used for this weighting is always a closely guarded secret, and the precise calculation is always subject to 'tweaking' as new trends come and go.
In order for a page to receive a ranking, it must at least be linked to another page that is already visited by the 'bots' otherwise they will never 'find' it...Hence the quickest way to get a rank is not to submit your site to Google, but simply get a link from another page (preferably one that is visted frequently). The most popular and frequently updated sites are re-visited by these web crawlers several times a day, more static sites may not get a visit for weeks...
The last point I want to address is that YES Google uses PageRank to ascertain a SERP (Search engine results position) for given search keywords, but this is only one of a number of factors taken into account. This means that it is still possible for low Pageranked sites to get high search positions for their niche keywords.
I hope I have turned some fresh ground here, I am aiming NOT to be too repetitive, but feel free to leave a comment if you think I bang on too much about Google...

What happens if you lose PageRank?

The moment of truth... If you want to know the potential effect of losing PageRank, I have plotted the demise(?) of a website (NOT this blog...) below with relation to visitor figures and Adsense earnings in particular.
First off, it has to be said that each website is unique, with it's own characteristics dependent on it's niche, the CPC of keywords etc...
The trends (actual amounts not specified) from the graph above show the effect on this specific site of dropping from a PR2 to a PR0 at around the date indicated by the red vertical line. Some of these trend lines relate to percentages, some to cash, some to numbers of visitors and it is only the shift in the trends that I am illustrating - I have deliberately steered clear of talking about absolute numbers.
These are my observations on the above figures, bearing in mind that this is just the experience of one example website:

1. Overall, the number of Adsense clicks have remained fairly stable over the period (bottom purple line), but the actual earnings have been rising (brown line near the top) regardless of PR, indicating that the CPC must be rising.... even despite the fact that adsense impressions (light blue at top) seem to be on a downward trend.
2. The percentage of visitors that I get from search engines has been steadily dropping (yellow line) along the same line as the impressions. Unsurprisingly the visitors and unique visitors track closely (pink line and blue line 2nd and 3rd from the bottom), they too show a slight downturn.
3. The most significant result to me is the evident drop in the search results figures (luckily I don't rely on search results for the majority of visitors), and presumably this can be directly related to PR drop affecting SERP (search engine results position).
4. Another measure which I would use to estimate whether the website is performing would be the amount of contact I have from potential clients (almost entirely via email), and I have to say that this has shown no significant drop recently, though this is sporadic at the best of times...
5. The final indicator is the passive earnings through adsense which seems to be growing despite a fall in advert impressions (indicated by the brown and blue lines crossing each other at the top of the graph - ie. impressions dropping whilst earnings are climbing...)

If I had to come to an actual conclusion based on the limited data I have collected, then it is that some things are showing a worrying decline, but the earning potential of the site is actually continuing to grow. I certainly have not been put out of business by the PR drop....and can happily continue to mine this niche despite the Big G's evident disapproval....

April 2008 earnings

April has been a good month for me with total munny4hunny earnings finally surpassing the $1000 mark after a little over a year, and the monthly earnings very nearly reaching the $200 mark for only the second month since starting the blogging to earn experiment. I have had to switch tactics to get the extra revenue, and hopefully using these tactics in the future will build up earning potential. There are now four blogs in the Munny4Hunny 'stable', two of which are niche blogs and are targets for paid text links, I have been using forums to identify possible 'customers' for text links and have brought in a little income via that route. I have also been using 'PayU2Blog' as a service to replace some of the other paid posting opportunities that have apparently dried up for me.
Away from blogging, Adsense is continuing to earn money (just been paid for the second time this year..) on my main niche website although I seem to have lost PageRank for this site for some unknown reason. I hope this will resolve itself, and will be tracking performance to answer the question 'Does lack of pagerank actually have any effect?'. I am looking forward to finding out the answer to this question...
From other projects, a further $300 has come in bringing total internet activity close to $500 for the month with a 40:60 split for blogging earnings against other projects.

Be true to yourself

If you are becoming a slave to:

1. Your RSS feed reader stats
2. Your daily Adsense earnings
3. Your PageRank
4. Your Technorati Authority/Real rank/Alexa rank

...think again...
My first rule if blogging is that you should be true to yourself, blog about the topics you want to blog about in your own style without compromising yourself to fit in with what you think is required by all these external pressures.
Why? Well for a start, PR hysteresis will change on a whim and there's nothing you can do about it, and your RSS reader figures will also change on the whim of individual visitors.
If you're trying to please everybody, then you're trying too hard. I maintain that if you continue to deliver good quality content, the rankings and visitors will follow. Naturally, you can help the process along with both on-page and off-page tactics, but unless the content is unique and of sufficient quality, there is little point....
There is good reason to use certain 'voices' and 'characters' to get your views across, but equally you will need to remain true to these characters. If you are not certain what I mean by characters, I will discuss it in a later post.

And now...

Well now, it's Thursday... so no big surprise there then. You may know that the Munny4Hunny experiment was all about paid blogging and whether money could genuinely be made from it. The obvious conclusion is that Yes you can, but lately it has been getting harder. That said, I have just signed up with a new service that has proved quite prolific since I got involved - I will blog about it once I've worked out if they have a referral scheme!! Suffice to say I have made $60 in 9 days with them and and quite happy that this month will yield a healthy balance as a result. That gives me still only a couple of active schemes since some resources seem to have almost dried up. The fluctuations in PR do not help and there appears to have been some movement, but none good that I can work our from what I hear from other bloggers - even John Chow has a PR 3 nowadays, looks like Google have the knives out for him, but I guess that is the best compliment that you could pay a blogger...
My findings have really revealed that if you are prepared to work at it, you could probably make a living doing paid blogging, but this would probably require a lot of hard work on multiple sites. If you ask me would I be able to maintain my current (non-internet) earnings via the internet if I were to lose my job, I would have to say that it would take most of my waking hours to be able to raise that sort of revenue... On the other hand, is it worth 'dabbling' at the current level of operation? then yes as long as it is enjoyable, then why not get paid for simply writing your thoughts and building new sites - and at the same time explore all sorts of avenues for passive earnings (the 'real' goal). Currently I earn about $100 in passive earnings from advertising of one sort or another (not from blogs) and this gives me a basis from which to fund other sites that I might want to build. Eventually, there is no reason why this income cannot grow to substantial levels.
The mission continues...

Spring is in the air

The sun is shining and I will be spending some time in the garden this weekend (my little one reminded me that I promised we would plant some potatoes...). Things are looking good and all is well with the world... things always look good on a Friday!
I visited feedburner the other day and was pleasantly surprised to find a good number of feeds were being read (well I thought 33 was good anyhow - last time I looked it was about 4...) so I placed the reader widget in my side bar so I don't have to keep visiting feedburner for my reader stats.
Pagerank also seems to have returned, so there's another reason to be happy - although I have had a lot of problems with trying to get an IZEA rank for this site since I changed to a dot com. I may have to delete the account and start again, otherwise I may not be able to do the PPP opps that I should be getting.
My livewyre.NET site has had a small PR hike from PR1 to PR2 and another blog that I have has gone from PR0 to PR2, on the other side of things my cassette to CD site seems to have dropped a rank from PR3 to PR2. Nonetheless, all in all, everything in the garden is looking rosy (today at least)

PayPerPost opens up...

PPP is famous for having strict rules about your blog needing to be 90 days old with 20 posts etc.. etc.. Well the big news is that they are slackening off their rules and allowing blogs at only 30 days old with 10 posts to join the program.
They have had the 90 day rule for a long time and one can't help wondering if this is linked to the way that Google has treated paid bloggers by reducing their pagerank. Maybe PPP just needs new blogs on which to publish adverts to replace bloggers who have left the fold. Or maybe it is a way of adding more blogs to the IZEA pot so that there will be more bloggers appearing in the top half of the IZEA real-rank system...

PPP Realrank

The new order may take some getting used to, but the prince of all paid posting schemes PayPerPost has been severely 'slapped' by Google - the king of all things internet (King/Dictator -take your pick...). The method that Google has taken is to lower or remove PageRank from blogs left right and centre, many of them even without a PPP post on them, though the consensus is that PPP was the real target.
Before we all start whining,we should bear in mind that this will affect PPP far more than it will just one individual paid poster... Maybe you have a case if you earn a living by paid posting, but Google giveth, Google taketh away.... If you live by PageRank, you have to take the consequences, He that liveth by PageRank will die by Pagerank... Okay, I'm out of lame quotes now, no more honest...
Now PPP have devised their own ranking system based on traffic, the question everyone is asking is 'Is it good to have high RealRank or low RealRank?' The answer is apparently: LOW- why because it really is a 'rank' as in 'He is ranked number one in the world...' The rank only applies if you have PPP tools Now ITK (Izea Tool kit) on your blog, and will work like this:
Let's say there are 10,000 people with ITK on their blog, you are ranked 999, this puts you in the top 10% (like a PR rank of 9), if you are ranked 9,999, you're in the bottom 10% equivalent rank 1 - or maybe it's 1 and 10 or o and 9, not really sure, but you hopefully get the idea...
As yet, we are not told how many blogs have ITK, so you can't tell where your relative position is, but this will apparently become transparent in the fullness of time.

Warnings about paid posts

Google are evidently clamping down on sites that do paid posts and are effectively offering paid links within those posts. Advice circulating around the paid post community suggests removing references to paid posts and sponsored posts from your blog. I have heard suggestions that titles such as 'sponsored links' are being hunted down and investigated by Google, the result being a drop in PR for those blogs that are deemed guilty of this practice.

The whole practice of paid posts will have to become far more subtle and posts will have to be made to look more like part of the blog. So much for those who have been upfront about doing paid posts, the practice will effectively be driven underground.

On the one hand Google is advancing blogging via 'Blogger', on the other hand, it looks like it going to try and remove the funding of these blogs by restricting Pagerank on the blogs that have paid posts and paid linking (such as sidebar links).

It looks like PR on the two blogs that I am currently using for revenue generation have been ranked down again (pagerank has been a bit like a Yo Yo for me this year!). On this blog alone I was firstly awarded a PR of 3, dropped to 2, raised to 4 and now dropped to 0 from what I can see today.... I think this could cause some aggravation in the blogging community over the next few weeks.

Turn-around week

I've had a good few days this week, I picked up a couple of jobs on my website amounting to about $150 over a couple of days - that was good enough, but then a remarkable thing happened... I have been moping for about four months over losing pagerank on my two blogs, but now it's back and better than ever!!
I went from PR2 to PR1 on this blog and PR2 to PR0 on another blog in June. That's a loss of 3 PR points over two blogs. Imagine my delight at getting a new rank of PR4 on this blog and PR3 on my other blog, making a gain of 6 PR points, and a net gain of 3 over where I was before. This will enable me to pursue what I had always intended to pursue, ie. my investigation of paid posting on a free blogspot blog - what's more I have two healthy blogs to do it with!

Technorati Update

Looks like I just broke the 4oo mark on Tech Authority rating recently... I've been hovering at 397 for a while, so it was good to get the breakthrough. I think the latest viral scheme I have been involved in is moving a bit slower than previous examples, but seems nonetheless to be relentlessly pushing the authority to new heights.
View blog authority
I am convinced though, that the viral-linking schemes that have provided such a rapid 'non-organic' boost in my back-links (I had an authority of 23 in June...), have caused my pagerank to drop as a result.
I have not found any other instances of bloggers losing pagerank yet, so I appear to be unique.... also I have not heard of anyone actually GAINING pagerank either. I would love to hear whether anyone has experienced pagerank fluctuations - or has pagerank passed most of the blogging community by this time? Please comment....

A New Focus

Well, the plan was to move on from doing paid posts as a PR2 blogger, get a new improved pagerank to experience paid blogging at a higher level.... Google had different ideas and dropped me a pagerank!! to PR1. I am guessing the phenomenal success of the viral linking flagged me up on the radar as a non-organic linker. I was not sure how to react to this set-back for a while, but I have found that there are still PPP opps for me, and I seem to be lucky enough to land some of them now.... So the new quest will be to experience paid blogging with PR1.
I have the 'values' of a PR3 paid-post blogger in that I won't jump at a $5 opp, I won't do gambling, 'enhancement' surgery or even dating sites any more - let's see what there is out there for a PR1 blogger with a sense of pride more befitting of a blogger above his lowly station!

'nother viral thingy...

Please note these viral linking schemes should carry a warning.....I participated in two last month and though I was successful in sending my Technorati Authority through the roof, the other effect seems to be that I have dropped a pagerank point....oooops - not the desired effect. I am guessing that this was probably because of the massive amounts of links I gained in relation to the links I had before the viral schemes - I wasn't trying to be greedy, I just had no idea how much effect these schemes were going to have...
That said, I can't effect a reversal of my PR disaster, so in for a penny....and as I said, this type of scheme is guaranteed to take your 'authority' to dizzy heights
This new scheme was picked up from the hotdogman - he gave me the honour of placing my humble blog at the top of his list, so it's only right that I give him all the help I can...


**Instructions**

The premise is simple: Write a post, and copy and paste my list from below into it. Make sure the links are active and correct. If your blog is on that list, remove it because your post isn’t about self-promotion. Don’t worry, because if your name is on mine, it’s on others and will spread. Add your favorite deserving blogs to the top of the list (not compulsory). Publish the post. People will notice the incoming links, and hopefully write their own z-list posts. The result will be that we all get more links pointing to our blogs, and more readers — it’s got to be good!

Key Points

1. Create a new post on your blog.
2. Copy and Paste the entire list of blog links below
3. Add any blogs that you want to include near the top of the list. (Optional)
4. Include the blog where you first got the list from, on the list in your post.
5. Make sure that all links are copied intact (use the source, Luke).
6. Publish the Post.

The List:

Linky love
Turnonepoundintoonemillion
Greg Stratz
Gold Rushin
Walletboosters
The Pink C
The Success Blog
Munny4Hunny
Coffee, Tea or Baabooo
Blog -Blond
What U Did Today
Recueilli
One Old Green Bus
Tiny Voices in My Head
Comedy Plus
You are in My World Now
Life With Heathens
what I think about...
Wonderful Thoughts
everydayweekender
Writing In Faith
The Hot Dog Stand
The Wired Kayaker
A Bunch of Stuff
The Porch Light
Winning Football Picks
Valuable Lessons We Can Learn From Children
John Chow dot Com
The Life of Ben, a Polymer Man
Lol-ette
Trik's Gulch
Peety Passion
Our Cheating Ways
$ Secret Money Blog $ By : Bob Matharoo
Notes of an Asian Gastronomist
SeevsPlace
userandloser.com
Journey of a Lifetime
A little piece of me
NoDirectOn (not: NoDirection)
Mellifluence
An American Peyote Scribble
Let's Share Feelings
Tales of Prinzcess Prinzcy
ChatnChill
The Blogger's Block
Footsteps
Laane on the World
Danny Danny Wakeup It's A Beautiful Day Today
The Political Realm
How to Earn Money Blogging
Electric Writer
About Every Little Thing
Dumb Ox Daily News
TwistedSister.....totally pissed off!
When I grow up...
POETRY BLOG GONE WILD BY PURPLE CRAYON BRAIN.. GET AFFECTED!
Weird Websites
The Hot Dog Truck
My Interesting Files
The Dwacon Blog
Just a Girl From LA
Chronicles: Alan B. Rowley II - Success Coach
IdiotBrain - Because People are Stupid
The Kerala Articles
Eternal Echoes
Splibble
The 15 Minute Dating Blog
Going The Wong Way
the hidden side of a leaf
Word Life!
Why Buy Used Cars
Cubicle Denizen
n E o A u T e U r
PhilosYphia
The Weight Loss Blog
J 4 JOKES
Sea Glass
PowerWealth.com
Bimbo with a Twist
Terri Terri Quite Contrary
Syaf The Geek
Disjointed Intelligence
Aussie Bush Food
Growing Linux Events and News Spot
A PURPLE SHADE OF BLACK
meta-DAD
Joe Schroeder Uncovered
What the...?!
Advertising for Success

Well that's it - if you're on the 'wild side' - give it a go....

Looking back on July 2007

Well another month comes to a close and bloggers everywhere are eagerly awaiting the latest pagerank figures... none more so than me...
I have hardly generated any revenue at all this month with paid blogging, and am hoping that a raised pagerank will help to open up some opportunities on that front. So what have I been doing? being helpful of course and reviewing free software that I have found invaluable (you might say 'priceless' ha ha). And what will you be doing next month? I hear you ask - Well I think next month I am going to post about blogging competitions. I have done a few this month and am hoping that I can find a month's worth of blogging copy by bringing some competitions to your attention (whilst of course partaking in a few myself....).
This month, I am also planning to launch a new website which picks up some of the themes of my helpful blogging month - watch this space...