Interesting Observations

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State of blogging and some

pearl 8

Gosh.. The entire blogosphere seems to be pre-occupied with text-link ads issue and Google dropping page rank for some sites…

but in the mean time what do the newer blogs do? The ones who weren’t fortunate to get any page rank in the first place?

confusion Well, I am still trying to understand the whole game of selling text links and page rank and in order to understand this whole phenomenon, what better place than to start off from Matt Cutts’ blog ? While searching for what exactly the issue is, I found an article Matt wrote on September 1st of 2005 about Text Links and PageRank, which is still getting commented on!

And it is almost funny [not] that even after two years of complaining /commenting on the same issue and some 230+ comments, Google has not changed its position!

The very first comment to this article was on September 2, 2005 by Jason Duke and it went like this

Jason Duke Said,
September 2, 2005 @ 1:22 am
Matt, do you think it is within or beyond your/Google’s business &/or moral duty to police how advertising is bought and sold ?

I ask because I understand the problem text link advertising can cause a search engine but do believe that it is that same business model that has allowed G to become such a commercial success story. I know there are subtle differences but ultimately G’s business model is to provide a service and sell text link advertising to deliver eyeballs to advertisers.#

To me it seems slightly cynical that G climbs a long hard ladder to the pinnacle of Internet success but then trys to pull the ladder up behind them “advising” others that TLA in its current form is not the right way to monetise a site.

And the most recent comment

LP Said,
October 9, 2007 @ 12:57 pm
Isn’t it time for Google to stop the whole page rank and link counting scheme? There are many quality sites out there that don’t have links to them. I work for an industrial manufacturer that sells equipment to other manufacturers. These are not the types of sites that naturally go around linking to each other. Most do have some links in industry specific directories. It seems that in this space the biz with the most products/pages ranks first. So how is the little guy supposed to compete? Buy links? Generate a bunch of content the customers don’t need, just to make the Googlebot happy. I think there are serious flaws in googles ranking system.

And interestingly, this week the debate continues on many blogs with hundreds of comments back and forth!

Oh how I digress sometimes! So, what do the blogs with no page rank do? They continue to participate in the memes or group writing projects and joining blog carnivals to get back links, building their blogs slowly, one reader at a time!

I am glad I don’t have the stress about these issues because I am not relying for income solely from this blog and have no plans to quit my job – yet anyway…. I am stressed out about a lot of the other issues right now – e.g. I am getting the hard wood floors replaced with marble tiles – in the foyer, kitchen, baths, den and pantry and the project is becoming a bit too stressful.

One last thing, while I am busy with this home improvement project, which I hope should be over within the next couple of weeks, I would like to invite and welcome some guest articles for Fresh Perspectives.

If you are willing to write for this blog, please send me a message via the contact form.

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8 comments
CHESSNOID

Good post! I am like you and search in the archives of much more experienced bloggers to try to understand all these things like page rank and text ads, and a whole lot more other stuff. Good luck with your home improvement project. Cheers!
;)

pelf

Aww.. From what I see, we bloggers complain and hypothesize that certain things may be causing our PR to drop, and a good example would be the “sponsored posts” and “text link ads”.

One the other hand, when we’ve gotten our PR raised, we would claim that it’s the “content” and the “hard work we’ve put in”.

Do you realize that nobody ever said that “my PR increased because of all the sponsored posts I write”??

Just my humble 2 cents.

pearl

thank you Chessnoid… Im hoping the floors will come out nicer :)

pearl

he Pelf… you know what? when I was writing, I did write that exact sentence and then sort of felt I shouldn’t :)

I agree with Slevi on this one, PR is turning out be just like Alexa, and the example sort of self explains, so there…..

hey Slevi.. welcome to my blog btw and thanks for taking the time to comment… your example puts things in a clear and simple to understand manner…. hope theres a better way for the advertisers to make distinctions amongst good-quality blogs vs not-so-good-quality blogs!!

the next post-galore should be “Alexa = #of visits, PR = # of links – which one should you aim for? ;)”

Slevi

I like how the last comment makes a very valid point on the flaw of pagerank, it’s not even so much for industrial sites only but also something like computer stores in example which you’d expect to be rated quite high. Well, it definitely doesn’t have to be if the links going towards it are mainly in no-follow locations.

In example when looking at a couple of bigger stores here there’s a few which have a pagerank of 4~5 with alexa ranks ranging from 25k to about a million. But there’s also others, of which one being pretty much being part of the 3 highest ratest computer stores within the country which just has a pagerank of 1. Along with that it has an Alexa ranking of around 120k so you’d expect a PR higher than 1 should be in place right?

But it’s just not there, even though in the many years they’ve been online they have gotten well over 50 million visits already quite some time ago, the PR is still lacking.

The entire concept of PR is just more and more going to lose it’s value, pretty much like Alexa. Alexa mainly is an indicator of the amount of people which have an alexa plugin installed, these days that’s mainly the people with SearchStatus plugin for firefox dropping by on sites whilst PR is more and more becoming nothing more than a little popularity contest. Quality or visitors asides, just aim for dragging in those incoming links and even with just 100 visitors a day you might end up with a PR of 5.

CHESSNOID

Your welcome Pearl. My friend is installing wood floors at his house and is half way done. It is looking real nice. Cheers!

Mihaela Lica

Well, there is more to the debate than PageRank. It’s the hunt for good placements in the SERPs that really triggers all the controversy.
Buying links is not that bad, considering that Google itself is selling them, in the form of text link ads. It’s Google’s hypocrisy that really bothers me. Their own buggy algorithm causes all the problems. As long as the search engine rankings will be based on “link popularity” there will always be those who abuse the system. And when the fever goes, there will be something else to trigger the storm.

Among all the linking strategies memes and group writing projects are not better, believe me.

Because he got penalized John Chow is missing important Google traffic and he’s missing potential readers too. And because, despite his aggressive linking campaigns, he is a good communicator and the content of the blog has a lot of good parts too, Google has done something not so politically correct, if you know what I mean. I’d call it censure.

pearl

Even the group writing projects?? I just entered another one Mig… :)

I think JC will still do alright, its the newer blogs who are still trying to find their way and haven’t even gotten decent reader base or are known in the blogoshpere that are going to get a harder hit with google’s strategy!