As of this writing, Typhoon Jangmi (Philippine name: Ofel) just evolved into a monstrous Category 5 Super Typhoon with winds packing up to 250 kph (155 mph) and roars toward the general direction of Southern Taiwan — but that is not exactly the news that I’m awestruck with.

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.

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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?

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It’s been just days since Microsoft released the second preview version of its flagship web browser that shocked me in disbelief, turning my negative expectations on Internet Explorer down. Now, we heard that Google just released its own browser dubbed as Chrome. For Google and its followers, it sounds like an exciting, business tool; for other browser developers, it’s less than a threat; for web developers like me, while it performs good, it’s also another piece of crap.

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It always feels good when hard work pays off. In my case, I’ve been running this blog for almost five months now and today for the first time, Google’s second quarter PageRank (PR) update for 2008 finally brought PR3 to this blog. PageRank is Google’s view of how important the pages of my blog are and they somehow influence advertisers with their own Web standards.The PageRank gauge can be seen when you install Google Toolbar on your web browser.

Wikipedia defines PageRank (PR) as:

…a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

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The Web has expanded immensely – so much that advertisers clash with each other in getting good advertising spaces on high traffic websites to promote and gain exposure of their products and services.

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. Continue Reading »

Bloggers commonly have two sources of significant income: money earned from the sponsored advertisements of affiliate programs, and the income coming from paid reviews. Signing up for an affiliate program is much easier to do than registering for programs that pays for every review post you make. Affiliate programs only require you to have a running website – that is why it’s the easiest thing to do if you want to monetize your new blog site.

Paid review programs usually require a certain reputation, PageRank (PR) level of a blog and number of existing blog posts, before an applicant is accepted to the program. Rumors about Google penalizing blog sites who participate in paid reviews, which in their view is a way of building links “artificially”, also discourages new bloggers to get involved to the said program. However, doing paid reviews still and yet the biggest income source of popular bloggers like John Chow.

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For quite some time, I’ve been using Google Analytics for my WordPress-powered blog as my primary tool in tracking and analyzing my website’s traffic. It’s a free service (like other Google features) for site statistics and help site owners in their decision-making, site planning, and marketing. It benefits even more those site owners who avail user Google Adwords to increase their marketing, since that service works in conjunction with Google Analytics.

Recently, I found another free statistical tool that works similarly like Google Analytics. However, unlike Analytics, it does not work only as an invisible web tracker, but it can be configured to act as a hit counter too. It is also much faster and responsive, quickly loading than the Google counterpart. It accurately reports site statistics in real-time. The reportage includes popular pages, entry and exit pages, referring sites, keyword analysis, search engines, visitor information, paths and length, visitor map, among others.

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We saw last year how intense the search engine battle was. Big companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google spent billions of dollars in efforts to gain market dominance in their online advertising business. At the end of the year, we saw that Google reigned supreme, with Yahoo, Microsoft, and other competitors closely trailing behind. Proofs were evident of Google’s victory: they acquired 17 innovating companies to call their own and with hopes to extend or penetrate further the online marketplace. If you don’t care, bloggers do – and they predict outright that Google’s glory will begin to fade in 2008.

Last year and until now, Google actively wipes out the PageRank (PR) of many blogs and websites they believed to have involved to link farms and other schemes designed to “artificially” inflate PageRank. PageRank is Google’s view on how important a web page is, thus favoring more important pages in their top Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Many observations reveal in totality that most penalized sites are those who joined networks offering paid reviews or links. For bloggers, PageRank is significant because many ad network companies (major source of blog revenues), begin to follow Google’s standards. Higher PRs somehow contribute to the continuous existence of most blog sites in the Internet.

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