Not that I really care very much about the green pixels, but there's a Toolbar PageRank update going on right now. You might care. You might make money off the green bar. So go ahead and check!

There's one thing I know: Performancing was penalized from a PR 7 down to a PR 4. Despite numerous requests for clarification, and numerous "I'm your slave" reinclusion requests, Google has neither responded in word or deed.

So what's the lesson?

Google is failing to reward the sites, even relatively big sites, that genuinely try to play by the rules. By neglecting our attempts to conform, I think that Google is unintentionally sending a message like this:

We don't really care. Go back to your old ways of taking sponsored posts, and doing text-link-ads. You'll make more money that way, and since you're already penalized, why not make money in the process.

Really, we want to do things by the book. We want to be on Google's good side. But psychologically, it's hard to justify a large cut in revenue when Google fails to reward you properly for doing things properly.

I really don't care about PageRank. What I do care about is the manner in which Google handles penalties.

What I do care about is the fact that three months after cleaning house, and removing text link selling, and submitting multiple re-inclusion requests, and getting ZERO response from Google, we're still being penalized.

Quite frankly, it's disgusting.

Openness, Google? Look at yourself before you start pointing fingers.

The EatonWeb blog directory, which attempts to order blogs in each category by "importance" according to a variety of metrics, has decided to devalue the role of PageRank in its algorithm.

The basic argument is this: PageRank no longer serves as a reliable indicator of importance. If EatonWeb wants to be a reliable indicator of importance, then it needs to devalue the role of PageRank in its algorithm.

So what are your thoughts? Is this a smart move? A bad move? A reactionary move? From an objective standpoint, does it make sense to start ignoring PageRank in favor of other more reliable indicators of blog value?

It seems that with the latest PageRank update Performancing has been nuked down from a 7 to a 4.

The idealists will tell you that this doesn't matter. That PageRank is obsolete. On certain days, I'm one of those idealists.

But the fact is that Performancing depends, for its success, on perceived authority. And like it or not, the majority of people in this niche still perceive authority based on a single factor - a little green bar.

Honestly, I'm not quite sure what the best response to Google's act of aggression is. So I'm turning to you. I've always believed that community intelligence is much greater than individual intelligence. And I think that the best answer for how to proceed will derive from the comment section...so please do be part of the solution;-)

First, let me list the facts:

1. Performancing, based on principle, has supported the idea of sponsored themes.
2. Performancing discusses PageRank on its advertising page and offers to sell links. We have sold a very small quantity of links. Perhaps 6-10 over the last 9 months.
3. Performancing has indeed done a few sponsored posts, but sponsored posts have always been fully disclosed.
4. Performancing changed its link structure in the previous quarter.
5. Performancing encourages its authors to use real-life examples and to link-out to their own sites.
6. The majority of outgoing links on Performancing point to sites that are A) run by Performancing authors and B) are completely relevant to the Performancing niche.
7. Performancing has had massive success (both in human response and link gain) over the last 6 months as our themes and our pMetrics stats package have been very well received. This points to site growth and momentum.
8. Performancing's Alexa growth over the last 6 months is completely natural and consistently strong. This points to site growth and momentum, which you'd hope Google might reflect in PageRank.

So now, what are our options?

1. Ignore Google and proceed as if PageRank is irrelevant, build great services, launch an ad-network and just brute force our way to being a counterexample to PageRank
2. Ask someone like Matt Cutts for a advice and a specific action set that will get Performancing back into the good graces of Google.
3. Add nofollow to all outbound links
4. Drop all paid and sponsored links of all kind
5. Go on a massive flame-bait campaign, ripping into Google for it's abusive use of power and the utter incompetency of its single indicator of site importance;-) This of course would be fun but maybe not effective.

Those are the options as I see them. The problem with 1) is just that Performancing depends on its authority status. the problem with 2) is that I once called Matt Cutts The Link Nazi. The problem with 3) is that most of our outbound links are completely relevant and natural and nofollow is really quite silly. The problem with 4) is that we'd be abandoning our theme sponsorship principle (not to mention that there are plenty of sites receiving links from sponsored themes without penalty). Since we don't really do a lot of business with paid links, it might be best to drop them all together. The problem with 5) is that Google is known to act like a friendly dictator, forgiving the people with power and resources and loving on those who are willing to get into bed.

So, Performancing community, what is the best course of action for Performancing at this point regarding PageRank?

Back from a nice 2+ week vacation to Italia and Greece. Vacation is a definite must for all bloggers;-) But it did occur to me while I was on vacation that I enjoy my work because I had the urge to get back into the cockpit.

So it looks like Performancing got nuked while I was gone.

That makes Performancing less important than the DrudgeReport. Which, in all candor, is probably correct.

However, some of the nuke's collateral damage seems to have hit YouTube - currently at PR 3 ;-) And that makes Performancing, at PR 4, more important than YouTube. I'm sure we'll see a few more jerryrigged epicycles added to correct this situation and get YouTube back up to PR 8+ where it belongs.

All of this nonsense points to just one fact:

PageRank should not and should never have been a factor in shaping your vision as a web professional.

All this talk of page rank seems to be the best or worst thing going on in the blogosphere, aside from the MS -> Facebook monies changing hands. I am not sure which side of that coin I fall on (for today at least). Sometimes the idea of page rank and moving up in results because of votes/page views/linked results claimed by spiders seems a good idea. Other times not so much.

Sure if you have lots of links and scrapable content page rank is good. However outside of that it is considerably less valuable.

The algorithm used by Google for page rank computes weightings for links. But is the rumor of a joke better for bloggers than page rank itself? It seems to me that for things on the Internet, the hype tied to the possibility of changes in technology get bloggers excited.

I am not sure what to make of the discussion of Page Rank... truth or rumor. I think the idea of ranking pages based on weighted scale is a great idea, keeping with the thought that one should not need to pay for a link to appear at the top of the list... but still could if they so desired.

This could be the greatest thing for a blogger or writer since the Internet itself. Allowing the number of visits to affect how and where your contents appears on Google seems to even the playing field. Sure you have to create good to great content for Page Rank to make even the slightest difference, but to me it seems to hold a great promise for bloggers...

and in many respects the Internet itself.

By now you've probably heard: Google spanked a lot of websites. Hard. Very hard. With a PR (PageRank) penalty, for yet unconfirmed reasons. Sites with a solid PR7 for 3 years, such as Search Engine Journal, dived to PR4. It's probably disheartening but nothing new for Google. One of my sites had PR6 in Oct (Nov?) 2005, then dropped to PR5 by the next PR rollout, where it's stayed since - though maybe not for long. Google regularly changes their algorithms, in their ever-pressing quest for relevant search results. Though this time, I think they let the proverbial Shakespearean Monkeys change the PR algorithm.

Still, as more than a few bloggers have said the last few days, PR is Google's toy to do with as they please, even if it means dinging true authority sites. If your sites got dinged below PR4, then it's possible you've lost some forms of revenue or soon might. Maybe. But there are alternatives to the ad networks, which you should start exploring so that you can get on with your business.

As Brian Clark from Copyblogger says in an interview at Problogger, the PR drop is the best thing that's happened to him. Of course, Brian has just launched his fantastic new Teaching Sells workshops, complete with articles, audio and video. I'm signed up and have started scanning the articles, and they're in line with my own beliefs pre-blogosphere: that selling content that teaches someone how to do something DOES sell. But it was easy to get blinded with the blog successes of the few, and then the competive facet of scoring a high page rank.

Ultimately, though, you should get on with your blogging and ignore PageRank (whoa, what a switch of stance), now that it's kind of a joke. I mean, Copyblogger and Problogger ARE AUTHORITY sites in their niches - as are many of the others hit - and by definition should rank high. So that proves PR is now useless as a measure and you shouldn't fret over it. Gaining relevant, quality backlinks should be your target (as always), but for their own intrinsic value, not for PR.

I still say blog as a supplement, not as an end-all. Consider freelancing and maximize your income. Or start exploring your knowledge and consider what you could turn into paid content. Are you a subject matter expert on any topic? Can you become one? If yes, then you have some options for earning online that go beyond Google AdSense and anything else that depends on PR: paid content in the form of ebooks, audio, illustrations/ visuals/ video/ screencasts, limited-circulation e-newsletters, subscription services and more. Don't even rule out print books. Sell your knowledge, and use blogging to show your authority in a niche.

In case you haven't noticed, the latest Toolbar PR rollout has been abnormal and slow. In the grand scheme of things, Toolbar PR is close to meaningless (Argument From Absurdity: it tells us that Performancing is more important than the DrudgeReport).

Yet as things go, hundreds of thousands of bloggers and website owners are attached to the hip of this stale, useless tool. Why?

Simplistically, the story goes like this.

Google literally came out of nowhere (a garage) to dominate the search space. The reason? They filtered search results not just by on-page text but by off-site "voting" in the form of links.

PageRank is the term that Google invented to describe their "importance" metric. While their filtering systems have changed dramatically since their emergence into search dominance, PageRank is a simple icon of Google's successful formula.

Despite the fact that Toolbar PageRank is often 3-9 months stale, and despite the fact that Google now intelligently buffers the importance of raw links based on a number of smart factors, Toolbar PageRank is still the king of the hill...the center of gravity for thousands of web publishers and seo artists.

Because of this, a massive virtual economy has built up around PageRank in the last half-decade. Some web publishers make upwards of 5 (and for all I know, even six) figures per month simply by selling this awkwardly valuable commodity.

Rightly so, Google sees the buying and selling of PageRank as a negative manipulation of their once innocent metric. In reaction, Google has implemented a number of temporal buffers to deter the text link ad market. So far, they have not been successful.

But as rumors build that Google is either completely dropping or radically altering the way they tabulate, update and display PageRank, lots of people are scrambling to adjust their web publishing business models. Whether its site consolidation, ad diversification, or complex SEO subtleties like anchor text variation, deep-linking or post-level link buying, it is clear that Google has succeeded in stirring a whole slew of people from their slumber. And that should be expected. We are, after all, talking about people's livelihoods.

Having set the stage, I now want to address the two issues I raise in the title of this article.

1. Does persistence always pay off?
2. Preparing for the busting of a fairly silly virtual economy built around a meaningless metric

Read the rest of this entry

All indications are that the Google PageRank rollout is going on right now. Evidence is that a few sites formerly without a PR ranking now have one. But wait until Monday before you start worrying, as some PR indicators will fluctuate.

Now this isn't something most of us will ever experience for our sites, but Jack Humphrey posted an article last weekend about a list of PR10 sites at Search Engine Genie. It's a very short list, but proof that they do exist - in case you doubted anyone site other than Google.com has a PR10.

However, this list, as far as I can tell, is from Jan 25, 2007, and some of the sites listed - including apple.com - are showing as PR9, according to my SearchStatus for Firefox extension. Apparently Google lost a lot of PR10 pages as well, so we're not the only people who suffer the decline. Except Google never has to worry about how much money their pages will earn from running someone else's ads.

If you're interested in a bit of PR10 history, check out the links at the bottom of the list, which show PR10 sites as far back as early 2004.

Generally speaking, don't get too obsessed about the PR of your sites except for ad networks that use it to measure what you'll get paid for ads. I'm a firm believer in organic growth of backlinks, but I use the term "organic" very broadly.

The DrudgeReport has been assigned a PageRank of 6 in the latest PR toolbar rollout. Performancing has a PageRank of 7. According to an official at Google (we'll call him Tim "the toolbar" Thomas for the sake of confidentiality), "PageRank is Google's measure of the importance of [a website]."

According to Google, Performancing.com is more important than DrudgeReport.com.

Congratulations Performancing staff. Job well done;-) The most powerful company in the world has spoken, and you've come out on top!

pMetrics looks like it has been assigned a strong PR 6 in the August 2007 toolbar rollout. That means that the early-bird advertising rates have now expired.

But don't fret. You can still get great deals on both text links and graphic ads on a subdomain that has over 885,060 backlinks. Leverage our 4,000+ pMetrics users and massive backlink strength to jumpstart your business quickly and efficiently.

Pro and Blogger pMetrics members can pick up a link for $45/month. Non-paying pMetrics users get a link for $59/month. Everyone else can get a link for $79/month.

Just get in touch with me at ryan@performancing.com to get your ad campaign started today.