I just noticed that Google has given us a little New Year surprise with the update of their pagerank. We have done quite well out of it with a good majority of our blogs moving up in the ranks. This blog went from a 1 to a 2…can’t really expect much more than that since I am still yet to promote it in a big way.

Some of the blogs we haven’t been working on at all have gone up to pageranks of 3 and 4….go figure! And most of the ones we are working on remained static. I don’t get it anymore and have given up trying. Pagerank really doesn’t reflect a websites worth like it once did. It really is more of a gauge to get a basic idea of how a website is going…but it’s still a bit of fun to see the changes.

So how did you go with the pagerank update?

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Today I finally got around to uploading a traffic generating ebook that I have been wanting to finish for a while now. It wasn’t that I was procrastinating…well maybe I was a little…but my main reason for not getting this finished earlier was that I was starting to think that I was really putting too much into it. 

I wanted this to be an ebook with solid content on how to generate traffic to your blog or website.  My only problem was that I was getting up to around 50 different methods and although they were workable I really felt that in the long run you really only need a little more than a handful of methods to really get good solid traffic.

We only use a few traffic generating techniques ourselves so I wasn’t really sure why I was recommending that many methods to others.

So as you can see from the title, the ebook got whittled away to only 7 methods…but don’t be fooled by this small amount – these are truly some of the best methods for getting traffic quickly.

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We hope you enjoy the ebook and we would love to hear your comments on this blog post.

Are we in the process of yet another Google pagerank update?  The last one was April 1 but I seem to be seeing updates on some of my websites.

Two of my sites that had a zero pagerank are now showing a pagerank of 1 – this site included. Another brand new site is now showing a pagerank of 3. The rest have remained static.

Could be just a glitch on my Google toolbar but I have tried it in a different browser and it is still showing the changes.

Fortunately, Google pagerank is not seen to be as important as it once was. It is a useful tool for gauging the importance of a website but it really shouldn’t be taken too seriously.  But I am so used to looking at that little green toolbar when I enter a site…it’s become a habit.

Has anyone else noticed the update??

Well there has been another pagerank update for this year and this time on April 1… yes April Fools Day!

I’ve only just noticed it today as one of my sites – yes this one – lost it’s pagerank completely. Not that there was much of a pagerank on here anyway at just 2 but still a pagerank is better than no pagerank at all.

I know that you get those out there who go on about how pagerank is overrated and you shouldn’t pay any attention to it and I agree to a point. Pagerank is definitely not what it used to be but really it’s all we’ve got. Well maybe it’s not the only thing but it is a quick and easy way to gauge the value of a website. It may not be perfect but it does the job.

I don’t actively promote this site in a big way – in fact, I hardly do anything with it at all except write blog posts. I really put most of my efforts into my product niche sites so I can’t expect to get much of a pagerank.

So although my pagerank has disappeared from this site and it is a bit disappointing I haven’t actually noticed any change in traffic.

But I have my theories about why the pagerank disappeared. I use a Recent Comments plugin. This displays visitors who leave the most comments and includes a link to their website. This encourages people to leave a comment. My theory is that some of these sites may be considered ‘bad neighbourhood’ type sites and Google doesn’t like it when you link to spammy type websites. I am going to remove that plugin and see if it makes a difference for the next Google pagerank update.

As for my other websites, one of them as gone from a pagerank 3 to a 4 and the rest have remained static. Interestingly, that site that has gone to a pagerank 4 has one page on it that has a pagerank of 5. It is not the homepage as would be expected but an internal page. It was just an article I uploaded about a month ago and linked to it from the hompage. Not sure why that is the only page with a pagerank of 5. Maybe Google are still in the processing of updating so it may change but I will keep an eye on it and post the results here.

How did you go in the latest Google pagerank update?

In the past few months we have started to notice an issue with our blog post traffic for one of our niche product sites.

What we have noticed is that at least once a month for about a week we lose about 50% of our blog traffic.

In the analysis for this it looks like that a good proportion of our blog posts just disappear from Google search. For instance, for one blog post in particular we are ranking #1 in Google for a particular keyword. About 5 days ago we started to lose traffic again so I checked that keyword and sure enough we are nowhere to be seen in Google for it.

Yesterday I did a search using quotes for a particular string of text in that post and the post didn’t register at all. In other words, it was de-indexed (is that a word?) from Google. Today I checked it and the post has reappeared but it is still not ranking anywhere for it.

In the past few months it has done the same thing each month. Very weird…but in all cases so far the posts eventually go back to their original ranking and the traffic will return again.

I know this can happen with new posts but these are posts that are up to 3 months old. Is 3 months still considered a new post?? I would have thought not but who knows with Google.

Anyone have any ideas on what the problem might be?

UPDATE 1: Within about an hour of writing this blog post the site started ranking again for the missing blog posts. The post described above is now back and ranking at #1. If it recurs again next month I will update this post with new info.

UPDATE 2: Well its the 14th February as I write this second update and Google has yet again taken out a good majority of our blog posts. Actually they are still in Google but they are no longer ranking like they used to. I have no idea why this is happening on a regular basis. It usually lasts about a week so I will update when the posts are ranking again.

UPDATE 3: It’s 9th March and the blog posts are finally ranking again. This has been the longest so far – just about a month. Since I have been trying to figure out what is causing this I did make a change to that blog so I am not sure whether that is the reason why it is ranking again. What I did was change the Post Title default in the All in One SEO plugin. The default displays the blog post title along with the blog name in the title. This means that the blog name shows up on every single blog post title. My thinking is maybe Google sees this as duplicate titles. I changed it a couple of days ago and now the blog is ranking again. I guess we will just have to wait and see whether that has done the trick or whether the blog will lose its ranking again next month.

UPDATE 4: About a day after posting Update 3, the blog lost its ranking again so traffic has died again. I think the next step will be to add nofollow tags to the Amazon links we have in each post.  Each post is a review of an Amazon product but it is all original content and in no way resembles the content on Amazon so I know that isn’t the problem. But each post contains 3 affiliate links to the Amazon product being reviewed. We all know that Google doesn’t really like affiliate sites so I am wondering whether that is the problem. I thought perhaps for every third blog post we should add the nofollow tag to the affiliate links. We will be doing this over the weekend to see if that makes a difference.

Well it appears Google has had their last pagerank update for 2008. From what I can tell it looks like the results are mixed with some bloggers moving up to pagerank 5 and 6′s. On the other hand there is also a notable amount of bloggers who have gone to a pagerank of zero….nasty!.

This blog has moved from a pagerank 1 to a pagerank of 2. Not bad considering we no longer bother actively going out and looking for links. In fact we don’t promote this blog at all anymore.

In contrast however one of our niche websites in which we actively look for links has moved from a pagerank 4 to a pagerank of 3. It appears that all our other sites have stayed the same.

How has this affected us? Well apart from seeing a difference in the green line on the Google toolbar it has made no difference whatsoever. Traffic hasn’t changed and rankings haven’t changed.

I used to be so caught up in the Google pagerank and would check constantly to see whether a new pagerank had come through. I got so good at it that even now I don’t need to hold my mouse over the green bar – I can tell straight away what the pagerank is by just looking at it. Fortunately I don’t do that anymore.

Old habits die hard however so every now and then I still glance at the little green bar at the top of the screen as I did this morning and noticed a pagerank change.

In my opinion the Google pagerank is really just a rough gauge as to the value of a website – it’s nothing more than that. Don’t get too caught up in it.