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?

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.

Why Release A New Browser?

Google’s engineers have succeeded to deliver their own web browser developed for two years, but why did Google choose to develop its own browser, considering that the current browsers are already excellent in many ways? Trust me if you set aside your beliefs, you would find that today’s current browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera) are already more than enough.

So why develop Chrome? Well, Google could say they mind us for this — but actually, it’s for their business. Google wants more so it needs ways to expand…and to have its own web browser is the best way. With it, Google can effortlessly tap more audience and infuse its web services to expand its market.

Google Chrome Is A “Virgin”

What are Microsoft and Mozilla have to say about Google Chrome? Well, neither of them find Chrome as a great threat for the time being. Both have expressed that Google is new to the browser market and it can’t shook their user base (yet) just like that. While Google Chrome in perception is aimed to flirt users using Internet Explorer, I definitely feel that Mozilla Firefox will suffer the greatest consequence should Google decide to halt support to Mozilla’s browser. Google Search has been the default search engine on Mozilla Firefox browser and because of that it makes Google one of their biggest source of funds. But that is not about to happen yet, Google Chrome is still like a virgin — people may find its speed hot, still it is undeniably tight-featured and inexperienced. By features alone, Google Chrome cannot stand against Firefox’s rich extensions library.

Google Wants Dominance, Empire Expansion

Like any other business, Google wants market dominance and with this goal in mind it already facing tough and tested industry giants such as Microsoft, Yahoo, among others. I particularly noticed Google battling Microsoft products even more in all possible, ethical ways. It seems to me that Google is becoming more and more like Microsoft except that it has the advantage of having the Web, which all technologies are shifting to, as its domain. Last year, we saw Google booming and acquiring heaps of other IT companies for its growing power. I have made a prediction that Google will fall this year, but with the advent of Google’s new browser that could change depending on how the people would be compelled to use it. Google could use its popular search engine as its weapon. However, it is good to note that Google Talk, Google’s own Internet messaging client, have failed to snatch the user base of Yahoo Messenger and other IMs. Google can’t have it all.

Should You Use Chrome?

Chrome by functionality and usability is pretty excellent, despite its freshness to the browser market and the fact that it’s just a preview version. Although I was awed by a faster Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 just released few weeks ago, I was even more enthralled to know that Chrome surpassed any available browsers on this planet in terms of JavaScript execution speed — and that means Chrome got muscles with it, considering that the trends of today’s web applications are shifting towards Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). Chrome has been built above several opensource code engines that have blessed Firefox and Safari’s superb browsing performance. 

Personally, I liked the simplicity and minimalistic of Chrome’s interface. Its tabs look intuitive and futuristic. However, since it’s just beta (note: it’s version 0.2) and even if Google could still boost it a lot, the current one is still half-baked. It doesn’t have most features of today’s popular browsers have — and that sucks.

Another thing is that as a web developer, Google Chrome is again another browser platform. It’s another piece of crap where all my web pages will have to be tested to ensure compatibility. If Google plans to create its own web standards in web development and other browsers will not support it, that would definitely a pain in the butt for me and all other web developers.’

Try Google Chrome now then come back and let me know how you find it.

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.

Benefits of PageRank

The first benefit of having a good PR if you are a website or blog owner is that advertisers start to notice you. The higher your PR, the more attractive you are to advertisers — this is a thumb rule. Now that this blog acquires PR 3, it has greater chance to make some money for whatever purpose it may serve best. Well, hopefully. I still need to exert more efforts and be consistent in pleasing my audience with my blog articles.

Another benefit of Google PageRank is during appraisal. If I decide to sell this domain, for example, I can use Google PR to determine the selling price of my website, along with my Alexa Traffic ranking, among others.

How Did I Build My PageRank

What I did basically was to provide good content. I did quality reviews in my previous posts and other sites seem to like them and they linked to my pages. Whenever they link to this blog’s pages, it is like they cast a vote for this blog to build a PR. This is how Google sees things on the Web for their PR technology.

During my five months of blogging, I also met new friends from the blogosphere and we ended up having our links exchanged. They added my blog’s link in their blog rolls and mentioned me somewhere on their blogs. What they did contributed as well to my current Google PR, which is good.

My Personal Standpoint

While the scale of PageRank (PR) ranges from 0 to 10, having a PR of 3 is fair enough for a start. For sure, there is more work ahead to increase the PR on its next update sometime this year. But for now, I want to thank Google for my score!

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.

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.

One of successful bloggers’ qualities is that they are very good at identifying trustworthy affiliate programs. They can easily detect which one’s reliable and a real money maker, and which one isn’t. Knowing such is important especially because everyone on the blogosphere wants to succeed. Unfortunately, it is certain that there are really chances where hard work doesn’t pay off, efforts backfire, and time is wasted. These can be minimized by following the guidelines successful bloggers follow in determining good and reliable affiliate programs.

The merchant should be legitimate and contactable.

If you feel that a certain merchant, the one who offers affiliate program, seems obscure and ambiguous, you should prevent from doing business with them. There have been many bloggers and affiliate marketers who became victims of fraud in the world of online marketing. Determine your merchant’s reputation by reading reviews, testimonials, and the success stories of their existing members. Also, ensure that they provide contact information and that they eager to listen to their affiliates’ inquiries and problems.

Commissions are substantial.

The commission of the products you want to promote must be substantial in itself. This is to ensure that the products are worth advertising for. If you are selling $3 item, then you must make a lot of sales to earn satisfactory revenue. It can be as difficult when you are trying to promote a high-ticket item – 20% to 40% commissions are already acceptable. If your blog is new, you may not worry about commissions being substantial or not.

There is a demand for the product.

How willing are you to market a product if nobody even wants to buy it? Well, that is indeed a question. There must be a sensible demand for the merchant’s products towards online consumer market. If you already have a blog site, your sponsored ads must match to your site’s theme or topic. Doing such will help you build credibility to your suggestions and product recommendations. Doing a keyword such on Google or Overture.com will help you determine a product’s online market demand.

Commissions are traceable in real-time.

If your friend purchases a certain product by clicking the affiliate button on your blog, the commissions earned should immediately reflect to the affiliate tracking software. Merchants running vague tracking software are a minus to the reliability of their affiliate program.

Promote relevant products.

If you are building a niche blog, it’s pointless if you join affiliate programs that aim to sell products irrelevant to your website’s topics (unless you can personally vouch that there is a high interest of the merchant’s products). However, I still highly suggest that you only promote appropriate products as this may translate to better conversion rates.

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.

It only takes four steps to get started with StatCounter. First, you need to register an account at StatCounter website. Then, you create a project for web tracking: it could be the whole website or just the major pages you want to comprehensively analyze. Finally, StatCounter gives you the snippet code that you just “copy and paste” to web page before the closing tag of the body. If you already experienced Google Analytics, you will observe that the application process is almost the same.

Bloggers who own sites powered by WordPress platform (like me) can also take advantage of StatCounter’s plugin. Like other WordPress plugins, this web tracker plugin is easy to install and use. Once it’s activated, it begins to track visitors from any page and reports more in detail the web traffic than any other WordPress statistics plugins.

Question: Can I put two web trackers on my web page? Yes. That is what I do with my websites. This website, for instance, is being tracked by Google Analytics and StatCounter. Each web tracker has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the weaknesses of one are complemented by the other. For Adwords users, Google Analytics may help you better in your web marketing; otherwise StatCounter offers more detailed web traffic report. The only minor rant I have with StatCounter free account is that its logs are limited to 500 entries only – but still enough for small to medium-sized websites or blogs. If you think your site is large, you can consider upgrading to larger log quota in various denominations. The cheapest upgrade is US$9 per month for 1500 log quota. But then again, I believe you’ll get the worth of your pay with StatCounter.

Click here to visit StatCounter website.

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.

This year, most bloggers started with a different perspective. They begin to take advantage and favor services believed to be “top Google alternatives” which, in their view, are less obtrusive to their ideals, more flexible, and more lucrative. It indicates a healthy competition and preludes another possibly more intense search engine and online advertising war this year.

My Personal Standpoint

In my personal standpoint, though I know I am quite a fan of Google services, I share sentiment with other bloggers that Google’s dominance could be an imminent but indirect threat; they impose policies and indirect guidelines associated with the usage of their services, or in relation thereof, that rather inhibit bloggers to be able to benefit from the Web as much as before. Google is giving free services to the masses but isn’t it their strategy to bait our hearts toward their products? This is debatable and I know there are many positive and negative points of view for this. However, for many bloggers, they view that the moves of Google imply that it tries to become the “Microsoft of the Web.” Well, in fact, I suspect one day Google and Microsoft will come to a head-to-head bout in creating their own standards with all people under them. Fortunately, we got alternatives to Google and they are fighting for themselves and for us.

I believe that Google will continue to be in the top ranks in 2008. There are many factors supporting this assumption. One of these, for instance, is Google’s reaction (and to least extent, Yahoo and Microsoft) with the depreciation of the US dollar. Google has safety nets that would ease hurt from the dollar crunch as other US-based companies are feeling. In the second quarter of 2007, Google’s financial report reflected that 48% percent of their income comes outside of the United States. Another point is Google’s acquisition of companies in 2007. If they are able to prove in 2008 that they did a wise move, these innovating companies under their control will push their business further.

In conclusion, like what bloggers predicted, Google might reach its plateau in 2008. Unless they make a good turnaround, its downfall will begin at least to most bloggers’ hearts. This should never be underestimated: bloggers are very influential people and they can badly damage a company’s reputation if they move together towards a similar direction.