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!

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.

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!

If you want to gain credible advices from experienced people in the web hosting industry, then there are no other good places than web hosting forums. There you can ask almost anything and get relevant answers from different people.

Even the people from hosting companies participate in forums to share their hosting experience, offer hosting solutions, and market their respective hosting plans and services.

Here is the list of the top three most useful web hosting forums that you can find on the Web. I strongly recommend that you register an account to all of them (yes, ALL) and participate with the hosting discussions. Do you know other great web hosting forums? Leave the links at the comments.

WebHosting Talk

WebHosting Talk claims to be the largest and most influential web hosting community on the Internet. Well, I don’t wonder why: try typing “web hosting forum” in Google search and it will list WebHosting Talk on the top spot. I’m certain that this website gets substantial traffic for its great visibility on the Web.

Anyway, anyone can register at WebHosting Talk. Underlining its claims, personally I agree that it is indeed the biggest forum that touches exclusively for web hosting.

WebHosting Talk provides special forums accessible only to its premium members. However, the main forums (and the most useful ones) are accessible to new, regular members. Those places are the perfect venues to gather advices relating to any web hosting topics or plans, learn from other’s experiences, and share your hosting ideas. WebHosting Talk is excellent because it has specific forums for shared hosting, dedicated servers, virtual private servers (VPS), among others.

WebHosting Talk has 181,329 registered members to date. Its forum’s index page has PageRank (PR) level of 6 and ranked #2,933 at Alexa.

SitePoint Forum

I first learned about SitePoint when I completed reading a PHP/MySQL web programming e- book I downloaded from a torrent site and published by them. Because that resource was excellent, I became skeptic about the authors and I ended up on SitePoint forums.

I’ve been a SitePoint member for almost two years and until now, I still find their website very useful to me as a web developer and an Internet enthusiast. They’ve got tons of tutorials and articles, blog posts, videos, books, and other resources not exclusively about web hosting but also other aspects of the Web.

The SitePoint Forum, in particular, remains my greatest point of interest. The forum is well-moderated and carefully divided into different sections arranged in a sequential manner of Web development. If you want to participate to hosting-related threads, you can find the section under “Host Your Site” which has three subcategories: Web Hosting, Server Management, Apache Configuration, and Domain Names.

As of this writing, SitePoint has 233,501 members who actively contributed to over 500,000 threads and over three million posts. The forum’s index page has a PR of 7 and positioned at #782 at Alexa. So, if you want to advertise something or ask help about hosting, you’ll get the best advice from the experts for sure!

Digital Point Forum

Digital Point Forum is another popular online discussion board where webmasters, marketers and advertisers converge. I come to this forum to get new trends in web development and analyze a web host’s reputation by throwing some questions.
Digital Point Forum has six major forum categories that cover topics from search engines, marketing and business to web development design and web products. The web hosting topics are discussed in “Site and Server Administration” under Design and Development category.

As of today, Digital Point Forum has 137,564 members actively participating to over 600,000 threads and over six million posts. Digital Point Forum’s home page has a PR of 6 and ranked #270 at Alexa.

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.

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.