Feels like more than a Super Typhoon, Google finally blew this blog’s remaining PageRank (PR) to dust: from PR2 to PR0. Now, the changes just took place three days since it reduced my PR4 to PR2. What the heck is going on with Google PageRank technology? While I’m not focusing my writings to build a PageRank (PR) anymore, Google is still the master of search engines and my blog’s traffic and reputation highly relies on it. However, their PageRank technology stinks: it’s out of schedule, it’s show-stopper, and definitely depressing.

Google Holds Us In The Neck

Whether we like it or not, Google holds the necks of bloggers and a lot of site owners as they can just easy implement contradictory algorithms without even announcing and realizing the impact of it to many people and their lives. We know that Google penalizes sites who sell links, and since that method is just one of best ways for bloggers to earn online out of their writing efforts, that’s a show stopper for us bloggers who work hard. Unfortunately, despite many efforts to rival the famed PageRank (PR),  it is still counts because lots of advertisers still have faith on it. Now, after all humors and having the first-hand experience, I could strongly say that it isn’t the measure of anything, not even any blogger’s reputation. It’s Google’s tool on how they want to manipulate the Web and in order to respect on it, you have to follow their own bureaucracies.

People behind Google should realize that they don’t own the Internet. If their guidelines try to affect the lives of those who work hard as bloggers and web developers by blowing off their PRs considering they have done nothing harmful to the society, then it’s best that they back off. I just hope that they find a way to improve their services and make things more transparent. They should provide a PageRank homepage or forum or any channel on their site to:

• show when exactly they will update the PageRank gauge on Google Toolbar
• communicate with site owners and bloggers with issues regarding their PageRank service and letting them know, reaching them about the impact of their technology on these people’s lives
• they let sites know what’s wrong with their contents when they lower down the site’s PR
• announce what changes in algorithms they do so that site owners can adjust their contents and optimize their codes for search engines in ethical ways

That’s all I can say Google! Trust me today, you made me feel how unfortunate I am. I would like to experience Super Typhoon Jangmi than you blowing my PageRank away just like that without an explanation!

I was speechless today when I saw that this blog’s Google PageRank (PR) shrunk from PR4 to PR2. I just got PR4 two months ago and I can still remember the post that I did and how happy I was to see that. It seems that Google’s Toolbar update today was pretty much out of schedule as they are known to update PageRank gauge every three to four months. This blog used to get PR 3 last April, then it rose to PR 4 last July 26, and now that my PR moved again (or slapped) to 2 — I realized it’s just been two months since the last update? What say you, Google?

Many bloggers are aware that Google likes to slap the PageRank of blogs and sites that sell links or do sponsored writings or reviews. Many believed that the fluctuations in Google Toolbar PR gauge are caused by the frequent change with their PageRank algorithms, others believe there are forbidden keywords that Google uses to identify paid links or paid posts — but how come the sites associated with Internet marketing communities are usually the ones who had their PRs taken away? Bloggers know that higher PR entices advertisers and promotes blog income. And whether Google likes it or not, in many ways blog income motivates bloggers to write more quality contents. Unfortunately here comes Google, the show stopper. I’ve come with a new resolve.

My Resolve: Don’t Blog For Google, Blog For People

Now I’ve renewed my resolve and cause to write for this blog: I will now write for people, not for Google. I guess it’s best that way (at least I’m not like a dog getting crazy following and finding ways on how to please the so-called Internet god, Google. Google may have struck my PR today, however it can’t move my zeal and vigor to write on this blog.

So what say you, Google?

Nearly three months after it first acquired a PageRank (PR) score of three last April, this blog’s home page again improved its worldwide importance in the eyes of Google during its third quarter PR update of 2008 with an increase of additional one point, resulting a groundbreaking score of PR4. Online marketers, especially bloggers, commonly see this as a significant increase of popularity and advertising value. Now, as the owner of John Raul Dot Com blog, I would like to tell some points to help if you are still struggling on getting a good PageRank.

Quality inbound links: these are basic elements of getting a good PR. However, getting quality inbound links aren’t as easy as it sounds. Many people relatively talked on their blogs many things on how to do this and do that about SEO, but they themselves are struggling to get good PRs for their own blogs. Many have suggested to do blog and forum commenting, however carelessly they end up having their PR saturated by lack of good SEO strategy. Always remember that the Google God is always watching and his eyes are fixed on what you do. Do good SEO ethics, and your PR will be safe.

Making good quality contents isn’t just the king of all SEO strategies, they can also potentially spark great interest from your readers, from other bloggers and site owners…

Making good quality contents isn’t just the king of all SEO strategies, it can also potentially spark great interest from your readers, from other bloggers and site owners — and you might get a nice inbound link reward if you make them happy. If you do not have something of good quality to show to Google when you update your site, then you have no reason to brag at all.

Now, don’t be discouraged nor stop writing. It is just a matter of time for your site to get a good PR score. Just be consistent with the good things you do and Google will reward you. Even in SEO, every good turn deserves another. So keep it up!

The dedicated IP address I got from THC’s Speedy hosting plan has helped as well in bringing better traffic and SEO performance to this blog. If you’re planning to have one, better check their hosting packages and enjoy the blogosphere.

Basically advertising involves costs as it does on television, radio and newspapers. Online advertising however, offers various ways to promote your products and services for free. Social media channels and online communities offer such opportunities in getting your products known beyond geographical borders.

Like other media channels, paid online advertising on high-traffic websites usually is a cost-efficient and timely marketing move. However, there are situations when such activities backfire especially when the advertisements are placed on irrelevant sites or placed in wrong advertising space.

This blog post sparks a series of discussions about online business promotion. Of course, this is aimed to help you bait real customers in the World Wide Web and making more money from them.

To have a head start, we will discuss the first and significant online business promotion channel: search engines.

Do Your SEO

Who else in the world doesn’t know about Google? Nobody except people who are still living inside caves, right?

As you might have known, Google currently owns the largest user base when it comes to web searches. This popular search engine is used by millions of people who are looking for something in the massive Web – people looking for information, entertainment, products, services, and so on. Oops, did I mention “products and services”? I guess I did.

Taking a serious analogy on that, it means that there are millions of potential customers you can have for your business. The problem is – how to catch them – since they browse through millions of websites which could be other businesses searching for their respective customers too. Meaning to say, you are not alone wanting these people – you have rivals like the typical business situation in the real world.

Now to arm yourself, you have to optimize your website to become friendly with search engines. This is first and most necessary business promotion activity you have to do before engaging on other methods.

Here’s what you need to do: try validating your each of your web pages to the following W3C validation services to know if your HTML markups and CSS adhere with the standards: the W3C Markup Validation Service and the W3C CSS Validation Service. If you find irregularities during validation, fix them if you can (else you can contact me for assistance). By doing such, you are making your site friendly to web crawlers and search engine spiders that contribute to your search engine ranking.

If your online business runs a blog that uses WordPress platform, make sure you read my previous post on how to optimize them.

I want to emphasize few things on what you must do for search engine optimization (SEO) since this topic is very broad and if we talk wholly, we would be making a whole separate SEO blog. You have to do some additional researches and make sure to do the following things to your website:

• Make sure you properly setup your meta description and keyword tags in each of your web pages.
• Name your web pages and image files properly and make them readable to human beings as they do to search engines. Make sure they present relevant keywords related to your site. Use hyphen as separator of more-than-two worded files.
• Put relevant ALT descriptions to all your images.
• Never use flash as a web page. Flash is known to be SEO suicide.
• Make sure your web page file size does not exceed 100 KB (images inclusive).
• In your contents, work on mentioning more the keywords related to your online business. However, do not overpopulate them with similar keywords.

In the next business promotion sequel, we will talk about how to generate press release buzzes and where to buzz them to make your business controversial and popular.

Theoretically the answer is “no.” Moving from one host to another does not affect SEO. However, if you are not careful enough and you fail to follow instructions your sites could face risks of defeating your SEO. The impact largely depends on the actual transition process from your old host to a new one but utmost it depends on you.

Downtime is commonly the major issue you may face when you change to a new web host.

Downtimes, for sure, are not healthy for your search engine-optimized websites, especially when it is prolonged. During downtimes, search engine spiders fail to crawl your site’s web pages and thus affect your pages’ SERP ranking when the search engine begins to re-index all downloaded pages by spiders to provide fast searches. Downtime is commonly the major issue you may face when you change your host. The good thing is that the chance of experiencing a downtime can be prevented. A good host would always suggest the following steps to provide your sites a smooth and transparent transition from your old to new host:

1. If you are moving a domain name to your new host as well, unlock your domain name from your old host/ registrar and provide your new host the EPP/authorization code. This will let them initiate domain name transfer request to your old host/registrar. If you are only moving a site or sites between hosts and does not involve domain name registrars, proceed to Step 2.
2. Set up your website on your new web host. Begin by adding your domain name in your new host’s control panel. Copy all your files to appropriate domain folder and copy necessary databases from your old host to your new host to “mirror” your existing website. You can test/view the files you upload to your new host by typing into your browser your domain name alias. If you don’t know about this, ask your new host’s live chat support.
3. Change your domain’s name server configuration (DNS) and point it to your new web host. After completing this step, your site should still be accessible online and still running from your old web host while the new DNS settings are propagating on the Internet.

The common pitfall in the process is when you take down the site on the old web host while the DNS is still propagating – definitely it would cause downtime for your site. It’s when the SEO risks come in. To prevent that to happen, keep your website files on your old web host for one week. This ample time lets the DNS propagation to complete which can be identified by monitoring where your website files are pointing to. If your domain is finally pointing to the files on your new web host, then the site transfer is done and complete. You can now take down the site from your old web host and enjoy the services of your new web host preserving your site’s PR rank and SERP position.

SEO is significant to site owners (regardless of the nature of the site) because it promotes greater chance of getting a higher position in SERP. Higher rank usually means greater probabilities of being searched by people, bringing traffic to their website and creating opportunities. If you just created a blog website powered by WordPress or you have an existing site that is not optimized, here are the most common effective methods you can do to improve your SERP rank.

Provide quality content at higher frequency

This is easier said than done. Providing fresh, quality content at higher frequency remains the most effective method of SEO. Quality content refers to the significance of information or services presented on your website. For instance, if you’ve published an article (or any content) that interests your users, chances are great that they might visit it again, promote it or create link to your website.

Search engines nowadays are getting smarter and more sophisticated that it can nearly bring visitors exactly to the page they really want. Search engines will look less on the syntactic composition of a web page, and focus more on the real, actual content. Since this is the trend, it’s wise to strive to provide quality content. The content, for me, remains the “king” when it comes to website marketing.

Make your pages searchable

Validate your pages and make sure they adhere to W3C coding standards. Having a good code in your pages basically will help spiders crawl and search relevant information on the page. Spiders are automated programs or scripts that search engine use to browse and discover the pages of Web. While validating your code does NOT improve your SERP ranking, it does contribute to an effective SEO by its nature. Use absolute links, and try to avoid making a Flash-dominated page because, as of this writing, it performs poorly in improving SEO. Dead links and HTML/JavaScript/CSS syntax errors should also be eradicated so that the page will properly be indexed.

Join the social community bandwagon

If you ever heard of social community and bookmarking sites (e.g. Facebook, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, Del.icio.us, among others), they are hot these days because they promote socialization beyond borders. Fortunately, webmasters can take advantage of them because they can be great tools to improve the exposure of a website. Most sites work by submitting to them your content through Web feed formats (like RSS), online bookmarking and personal submission, which they publicize. Squidoo, for instance, lets you create blurbs to promote or sell just anything. If interested online readers found them, they can potentially bring huge traffic to your blog or website. To participate, visit social community websites and create an account to them.

Install SEO-friendly WordPress themes and plugins

Personally, the Themes and Plugin feature are among the myriad things I love in WordPress blog platform. They are easy to install and you don’t need to be a geek to be able to add widgets and extended functionality (well, it helps when you know HTML, CSS and PHP – but don’t be scared if you don’t). If you own a WordPress-powered blog, visit their official website and browse for SEO-friendly plugins and themes. You may personalize them if you want.
This website, powered by WordPress, uses the following plugins:

• Adsense Deluxe
  Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higher. For complete usage and configuration click on AdsenseDeluxe under the “Options” menu.
• All in One SEO Pack
  Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• Digg This
  Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referrer.
• DoFollow
  Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
  Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Google Search Widget
  Adds a sidebar widget to let users search your site with Google.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.
• Social Bookmarks
  Adds a list of xHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.
• Text Link Ads
  Really Simple Web/RSS Advertising For Personal or Commercial Use
• WordPress Database Backup
  On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
• WP-Cache
  Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.
• WP-Print
  Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• WP 2.3 Related Posts
  Generate a related posts list via tags of WordPress 2.3
• WP YouTube
  WP YouTube makes it easier for you to post embed YouTube videos in WordPress. It also features YouTube options , for you to control all the YouTube videos at the same time.

I’d like to give credit to the creators of the above-mentioned plugins. It is up to you to discover how they work and what benefits they bring. Also, please note that there are other plugins that you may want to install for your WordPress site. My personal advice, however, is not to install too many plugins because they may consume too much CPU resource if you are on a basic hosting.

Spread your links to the world

In SEO, it is generally better if you strive to have more inbound links. Inbound links are links pointing to your website from other sites. If you are blog is new, it is wise to submit your website’s Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to free web directories. This can initially build inbound links that can be beneficial. Your next option is to exchange links with other bloggers or sites. Making friends online, blog commenting and link baiting usually help. If more of your inbound links come from sites with high PageRank and belongs to your blog’s niche, you might increase your blog’s PR as bonus. There are still quite a number of methods to spread your links to the Web, I leave it to you to discover. Enjoy!