Google PageRank Update Coping Skills
Google updates their PageRank what seems like around once every four months. When this happens, the blogosphere, mainly the MMO / SEO niche tends to get frantic. John Chow mentioned on his blog today that he saw his PageRank go from a PR3 to a PR4 today. Others may also start to notice changes in their PageRank as well. Usually when Google updates PageRank, people start to freak out. I wanted to offer some advice and provide you with some coping skills that will allow you to better adjust to the changes being made.
First thing to understand is that the process of updating PageRank is pretty involved. Now, I don’t know all the science behind all of this, but I do know that the entire migration can take up to a few days. You may notice that your PageRank has updated while your readers report differently. You may also notice that your PageRank has decreased while again, your readers will report differently. Google has many servers and the update has to roll across their entire network.
If your PageRank was once a PR4 and now it has become a PR3, that really might not be the final result. So, before you go off and bitch and cuss Google for giving you the shaft, I would suggest waiting the storm out a few days and let the dust settle down a little bit. Your PR3 actually might jump to PR5 and wouldn’t you feel like a horses ass if you wrote hateful things about Google and then the next day you discovered that they gave you a PR5?
Here is another aspect that I want to comment on…
I played by all the rules, I didn’t sell Paid Links or publish sponsored reviews from places like ReviewMe.com or PayPerPost.com and yet my ranking dropped!!!!
I here people bitch about this all the time. Publishers feel that because they play by the rules they expect Google to give them a great PageRank. I want to remind people that even though you play by the rules, this doesn’t mean Google should be expected to give you a decent PageRank.
PageRank is not a reward for playing by the rules. PageRank is given to you based off what people think about your blog. If people like what you write and they link to it and you have a good amount of incoming traffic and your content is considered as a hub point or a place of great value, then Google will give you PageRank. And to clarify, its not really Google who gives you the PageRank, it is the readers and viewers that give you the PageRank. Again, this all is under the understanding that you are playing by the rules.
A blog author can play by the rules and have a totally lame blog, that people don’t read and don’t link to. Even though this publisher played by the rules, the likelihood of that blog establishing any notable PageRank is slim to none. PageRank is a value assigned to all individual pages that reflects the quality and popularity of a file on the Internet. That can be a web page, PDF file, Word Doc, etc… (any page that is machine readable).
After the dust settles down and the final PageRank of your blog is known, if you’re not satisfied with the results, you need to sit back and reflect on how you ran your blog during the last 4 to 6 months. I believe that there is a delay in PageRank. I am not quite sure the exact period of time for this delay, I suspect it is around 2 to 3 months. This means that your current PageRank is a reflection on what you did with your blog or web site 3 to 6 months ago.
If you should have any questions, feel free to use the comment form and ask away. I’ll try to help everyone as best as I can regarding PageRank and the recent PageRank updates.
Tags: Google, Google PageRank, Google PageRank Updates, Google Quality Guidelines, PageRank Updates
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Maybe because I do not blog about the MMO niche I am missing something here. Why is Google Page Rank so valuable? Do people use their PR as a bargaining chip when seeking direct advertising? I would think real traffic numbers, RSS subscribers, bounce rates, page views, etc. would be more valuable than PR. Or is a high PR the key to getting better placement on search engines? Maybe I am just dense but I do not know why all the Chicken Little’s of the blogosphere go crazy every time their Page Rank moves up or down one point.
Gary I believe you are incorrect about your paragraph that starts with “PageRank is not a reward for playing by the rules”. At least my experience does not bear that out at all.
My blog has gone from 0 starting out to 3 (I then broke the rules) down to 0, then I fixed things and played by the rules up to 2 and now my toolbar shows 0 again (no rule broken).
I have 9000+ incoming links, 100+ posts, and as much traffic as ever and in fact more Google search traffic than ever (100+ unique traffic hits per day). I am confused why I should be going down to a PR 0 again.
This is the kicker. One of my two months old blogs with just about 10 whole posts and very little traffic is now a PR2! LOL LOL
As you can see, this experience directly contradicts what you have said in most of your post here. I have another 2 month old blog that now has a PR 1. Needless to say, they are absolute JUNK compared to DayJobNuker.com.
Now my toolbar shows a PR 0 right now and if that somehow changes back up to 2 or 3 then you can ignore most everything I have said here
I’d like your comments if you could. Thanks.
Bruce
soon after i red your post i open free pr check service on the net, and check all of my blogs and 3 of my blogs pr went down, thanks for the info
one more thing, conguratulation for your PR 5 Garry
Hey Garry — looks like MasonWorld is showing as a PR3 now. Should I expect that to stick?
I don’t understand the pagerank anymore. It seems like the new PR0 is at like PR3 or PR4…lol
-Mike
The only the Toolbar PR is useful for is pricing links you want to sell that pass pagerank, which if you are doing that then your pagerank probably doesn’t matter too much to anyway.
PR = POINTLESS Rank
It’s looking like my site is going from PR3 to PR4 which is good, but like Matt says, event though it looks good in the toolbar, I’m not sure of the real value of it.
A static site of mine, that has not changed in the past year and couple of months has actually held a decent PR of 3 for this time and just with the recent update has jumped to a 4. I think the site that I have put the most work into over the past couple of months has got a PR increase of 1. Also, I think that the Google webmaster tools can help you predict your future PR. The site that jumped to a PR of 4 has all low, and quite a lot of unassigned PR, (about 1/3rd) While another blog of mine has a lot of low and a small percentage in medium. I suspect that some time the PR may be higher than the current 3 that it is. Any way, although PR is nice, when ever I have seen PR jump, it doesn’t really seem to effect traffic for me.
Google is updating PR on every month’s end for a few months ..
within 2 months my PR has been changing from 0-4-0
Well Gary you haven’t bothered to comment. I can think of no other reason other than you know most of this post is just plain wrong. Especially the part that says:
“PageRank is given to you based off what people think about your blog. If people like what you write and they link to it and you have a good amount of incoming traffic and your content is considered as a hub point or a place of great value, then Google will give you PageRank. And to clarify, its not really Google who gives you the PageRank, it is the readers and viewers that give you the PageRank. Again, this all is under the understanding that you are playing by the rules.”
I can come up with numerous examples of absolute nothing blogs with garbage links and little traffic that have a PR rank of 2 and 3. I have a couple of them myself.
I won’t bother to comment or come here anymore so I will get out of your hair. I’m gonna stick with Grizzly’s blog as he seems to knows more about Google, Adsense, and making money than all the other bloggers put together. Good luck.
You broke the rules… your domain name is probably tainted. I don’t work for Google, I don’t know what you need to do to redeem your blog. You broke the rules, you got busted and now you’re paying a price for it. My focus is in developing solid sites with a solid foundation. Not in making efforts towards rebuilding a blog after being subjected to penalties.
Again, you are telling all the wonderful stats you have that point to a damaged domain name. As far as the newer domain names that you illustrate as being lesser in quality, yet having less in volume of quality content, my guess would be because they are new domain names, possibly on different server and or IP address as the other domain name and you started things off on the right foot.
Also when I said that gaining PageRank isn’t a reward for playing by the rules, I stand behind that statement. If you play by the rules participating in a sport such as basketball, just because you play by the rules doesn’t mean you’re entitled to win. Playing by the rules gives you the privilege to participate in the game. The same is true with PageRank. If you play by the rules then your blog is entitled to be subjected to the system of PageRank. Actually regardless of if you play by the rules or not, your site will still reflect a score ranging from 0 to 10.
It is obvious that you are frustrated with Google. However when you decide to go against their guidelines, you’re going to pay a hefty price. Heck, its been almost a full year and even John Chow still to this day can’t rank #1 for his own personal name.
No, I don’t see that at all. You have a delusional aspect of this whole situation due to your personal frustrations with Google. If you opened your eyes you would see that everything you may be doing right with your new blogs are taking effect. While the better work is on DayJobNuker.com, it doesn’t matter, as you basically slammed your foot in the door on that site.
This concludes my response on your first comment. Your second comment, which is quite rude, I’ll address it below.
First off, I think it is very selfish for you to leave me a comment like that. You have been reading my blog for it seems over a year now. It is obvious that you are frustrated with your blog’s performance; however, using me as a way to vent your frustrations is not acceptable. I am here to help everyone as much as I can.
However, and do follow what I say word for word, and I’ll put it in all caps, just so that you don’t miss this:
I AM HERE TO HELP MY FAMILY, MYSELF AND PEOPLE WHO ARE IN AN IMMEDIATE BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH ME FIRST AND FOREMOST BEFORE I HELP ANYONE ELSE.
Does this make me selfish? No… I have a wife, three kids and one more on the way. Unless you’re willing to offer me a little reach around and throw some dollar bills my way, it could a day, a week, a month, a year, or NEVER until I respond to a comment.
If this situation was of any real concern to you and you genuinely wanted my help, you’d send me an email, contact me via instant messenger, call me on the phone or send me a letter to my home address - all of which are made available to my readers.
For the fact that you illustrated frustration in me for not responding to your comment is utterly selfish and not appreciated one bit.
Seems kinda strange for you to have been a regular reader for such a long time and then to throw it all away for one post out of close to 700 written that you don’t agree with. However, it is your choice to read what blogs you want. You seem to have multiple frustrations and this is a business that involves a ton stress, trial and error.
As far as not responding back to you sooner in the comments, man I don’t really consider that to be a valid complaint as I make myself personally accessible to my readers practically 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
I’d like to invite you to continue reading my blog and to continue interacting with me. However, this under the condition that you’ll treat me with respect and appreciate the volunteer and individual work I provide. If you continue to use my blog and direct words of personal frustrations at me, you will not have a choice in the matter of reading my blog or not. I’ll simply take the choice from you and ban your access to it.
I work incredibly hard, at times 20 hours per day… anyone that follows me in GTalk can vouch for that. There are times when I go days without sleeping and there are times when I don’t respond to comments on my blog. I keep extremely business, yet I still make extreme efforts to help anyone in need.
I’ll admit that your comment has totally disappointed me and I’ll also admit that my feelings won’t be hurt one bit if you decide to never read my blog again. The way I see it, its one less person I need to worry about helping and it gives me more time to devote to people who do value what I do.
Good luck with your blogging ventures.
Best Regards,
Garry Conn
Well said, Garry. As someone that you have helped a lot, I can say that I am impressed with your restraint on this one.
You know… man, I am still disappointed in myself. I think even still I could have handled that differently. LOL!!! Maybe omit the banning part, that was kinda childish.
Thanks for your support though. Speaking so much about Day Job Nuker being frustrated, it kinda frustrates me to get a comment of that nature. As I blog more and more, my skin tends to get thicker and thicker. For those who have been following my blog since day one, I am sure you’ll agree… and Mark, I won’t discount you on that either for the fact that you have gotten to know me at a very accelerated pace. Indeed, I did bite my tongue on the last comment, but I could have bit it harder.
Oh well, live and learn.
A damaged domain name? A TAINTED DOMAIN NAME? Are you really serious? Where do you come up with this stuff? LOL. I did THREE PAID POSTS AND DID TWO TEXT LINK ADS. Then I took them down when I was told that violated Google’s terms. Thats it man. John Chow proudly takes in thousands to this day via those methods and still has a PR 4 or 5.
I”m sorry Gary, but you don’t understand PR any better than anyone else. Thats my point. That is so evident and again in your tirade back to me you interestingly ignored YOUR paragraph:
“PageRank is given to you based off what people think about your blog. If people like what you write and they link to it and you have a good amount of incoming traffic and your content is considered as a hub point or a place of great value, then Google will give you PageRank. And to clarify, its not really Google who gives you the PageRank, it is the readers and viewers that give you the PageRank. Again, this all is under the understanding that you are playing by the rules.”
I say to you again, this paragraph is WRONG! It cannot be correct no matter how you spin it. A two month old BANS site or niche site (I have both) with very few links, very few visitors (I’m talking 100 to 200 a MONTH) cannot have a PR 2 or 3 according to your paragraph. Well mine do.
No you are correct that you don’t work for Google and no one does so it is frustrating reading on this blog and others all about Google and PR when I think it is clear that no one knows! I apologize for sounding rude and I guess being rude. I don’t know why but something just rubbed me the wrong way about this post since you seem to have been doing a lot of lecturing other bloggers lately and I firmly believe much of this post has incorrect info.
DJN……why not go ask Griz his opinion? If you disagree with Garry then swing off Grizz’s nutsack for a while. It is very well known that Google makes absolutely no sense sometimes and a site that hasn’t played by the rules in the past could very well be incurring a PR penalty.
Google often doles out PR slaps like a -2 or a -4 and sometimes they put you at 0 period. If you should be a PR2 and you are fighting a -2 penalty then your toolbar will show a PR0.
If you were a PR4 with your -2 penalty then you had a PR2 for a while but something must have changed since then. John Chow does break the rules and instead of a PR6 like Shoe and Darren…he’s a PR4. Why is that difficult to grasp?
You might be a standup guy but your acting like an obnoxious little troll.
Alright well I apologize. I was rude and I am sorry for that. No excuses, just I was wrong to attack and I am sorry. I hope you can forgive me.
Bruce
It seems that Bruce does indeed need to develop PageRank coping skills. May I recommend some links for you bud… LOL!!!
Stress Management Tips and Techniques | PR5
Stress Management & Definition | PR5
Common Causes For Computer Stress | PR5
I am just making light of the situation, I have no idea if these articles will help you, I didn’t even read them.
BTW, what’s up with this post where you go on a little sissy rant about how Google shafted you out of your PageRank while you openly admit and even contacted Google yourself telling them that you published sponsored posts and sold paid links?
In this post you act like a little child who had candy taken away before dinner. The best part of the post is when you said this, “For now I am going to keep the blog and post whenever I can. My subscriber numbers will go down, as will the readership - I know that. I have no idea what I will post, when I will post, or what the quality of my posts will be. Actually, you might have noticed that both the quantity and quality of my posts have been going down this year. The bottom line is that I just don’t care that much anymore…”
So, let me get this straight, because you’re going to act like a big sissy baby after having your PageRank stripped down to nothing, you are then going to abandon your blog and abandon your friends, readers and people who follow your blog all because of not having PageRank.
Well Bruce, to me it seems clear where your priorities are at. I already made it clear that my family, my friends, my business partners and myself come before anyone else. However, based on what you said in the above quoted text, it is totally clear that you don’t give a rats ass about the people who value and follow your blog.
Really, I have got to know… are you really going to shut down your blog because you don’t have PageRank? If PageRank meant so much to you then why did you take the risk and sell paid links and publish sponsored posts?
Here’s the thing, I don’t care what you do with your blog, if you sell paid links, sell Christmas decorations, etc.. It doesn’t matter to me. What does bother me are people that take the risk and do things that are against Google’s TOS and then after they get busted they act like innocent victims who have done no wrong. You took the risk, you got caught and now you want to act like a little child and not get what’s coming to you… real class you have there bucko. You might as well go ahead and abandon your blog since you have already made it clear that you have abandoned your readers.
All the luck to you in blogging, it seems you have a lot to learn. You don’t need to apologize to me. It’s your readers that you need to apologize to, many of which are my readers here.
Best Regards,
Garry Conn
Again, I apologize for coming to your blog and critisizing your views. I especially regret the manner in which I did it. If someone reading my blog did the same thing I did to you I would not like it either. I realize that now. I was wrong to do it and I hope you can forgive me.
Bruce
I don’t run a John Chow blog where I have mindless commenters who come here and “Jump” when I say jump… I want people who have opinions and have minds of their own. Anyone is welcome to challenge anything and everything I say. The experience can only better the group as a whole. While GCDC is a personal blog of mine, it has also become a community site for many. This is a community of people who all want to learn more and find success in the business of making money online.
I don’t mind people balking on my ideas and views; however, I do expect that people maintain a professional demeanor on my blog - holding myself accountable for that as well. The things I said back in response to you weren’t necessary either. So we’re equally wrong with how we interacted with each other.
In this case, whether you’re right or wrong… does it really make a difference? The end result is this, you feel like you don’t know why you lost your PageRank and I can only take guesses. If it was my blog there would be a few things that I would modify.
1.) Your blogroll states that you are willing to barter and or exchange reciprocal links with ONLY sites that are of good quality. To me, that means you’re only willing to exchange links with sites that could possibly have a high PageRank. Secondly, you admit while you would prefer to exchange with sites that are relevant to your own, you are willing to exchange links with sites that have no logical relevance to your own.
After reading that and then seeing that your blogroll links are not NOFOLLOW would indicate to me that you are in the business of bartering and exchanging links for the purpose of exploiting the PageRank system towards making an attempt to increase your PageRank.
Your blogroll mentions nothing about being a means for providing excellent external content to your readers and that was initially the true purpose of having a blogroll. As blogging become more and more popular, people instantly started to discover how they could use their blogroll to barter with other publishes to gain a better ranking, increase traffic, etc… Darren touched on the topic of having a blogroll very recently.
2.) I want to ask you why you display Yahoo Publisher ads on your blog? There is nothing wrong with Yahoo Publisher as I use them on many of my blogs as well; however, the most common trend within this niche as the reason why people use YPN is because they have been banned from Google AdSense. Just curious, are you banned from Google AdSense? If you were banned from Google AdSense, don’t you think that that is also yet another red flag against your online identity?
3.) You’re being very stingy and selfish with your in post linking. It seems like 9 out of every 10 links within your post either point back to your home page or point to another post you have written in the past. Rarely do you ever provide an external link pointing to an external source of great content.
If I find 10 pages on the Internet that are awesome and then I make my own page that provides an excellent presentation of the ten pages and provide and invite people who read the page I created with a link that allows them to expand further on each reference that I am talking about, that in itself creates value. The page that I created in essence kills 10 birds with 1 stone.
You don’t seem to have that writing style on your blog. Majority of the links found on your post simply link to something else that YOU have written rather than someone else. For what it seems, the only instance you provide an external link, that link simply points to a product that you’re pitching and trying to sell.
As far as your relationship with Google, I am sure that you have already done this, but just in case you haven’t you can get your blog right and then submit your request for reinclusion here:
How Do I Request Reconsideration
Additionally, you can get Matt Cutt’s take on the matter on his post titled, Filing a Reinclusion Request.
That is all I have for you man… I have invested way too much time pouring water on a bridge that you decided to burn. If you like me, read me… I am here to help. If you don’t then there are a million and one other Garry Conn’s in the little world we call the Blogosphere.
Gary,
Please let this die. I apologize and I am sorry. The answers to all your questions are on my blog but I don’t expect you to read it. I am not banned from Adsense but I use Yahoo ads because you cannot get smartpriced with them. (at least as far as I know) Using Adsense on a “make money blog” with some social traffic runs the risk of getting your whole network smartpriced which I don’t want to happen. I tried Yahoo ads and love them so far and they pay by Paypal which I like too.
My blogroll post was done one year ago and I have never updated it. In fact I had even forgotten about it. Also, as you mentioned, my blog is no longer necessarily for regular readers. If I have any then great. If I don’t then I don’t care either because my goal is to get upwards of 80% search engine driven hits. I can make some money from that kind of traffic but I cannot from regular readers. Again this is all on my blog but I understand you have no interest or reason to read any of it. I don’t have the time or desire to pump out daily content any more. So this is the result as I have realized there still is value in my blog.
One final thing, I was upset because I had climbed back to a PR2 and then now back to zero for no apparent reason. If I had stayed at Zero the whole time it would have been more easy to understand. But why take me to a 2 and then back to 0 again? This is something only Google will ever know.
This will end here with my final apology.
Check this link out http://lordswam.stumbleupon.com/review/20812290/ googles last update appears to have assigned a pagerank to this websites sitemap.xml is that even possible, obviously is but never noticed, please comment.
It seems that Google PR means nothing now. So I don’t care about it anymore.