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

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.

It's obvious from the latest Page Rank update that Google is strongly buffering the effect of certain kinds of links. What kind of links? That's a complex question, but I think I can answer it with two words: undiversified links.

The key to linkbuilding in 2007 is diversification. Below I explain five ways to diversify your links moving forward.

1. Stop pointing incoming links to your homepage

Let me set the record straight. At this point in time, if you focus 80% of your linkbuilding into non-homepages of your site, you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck. After the last PageRank update, I had the intuition that Google was severely buffering the PageRank of sites that had an inordinate ratio of links going into the home page as opposed to those going into sub-pages. It's much harder to manipulate deep linkage than homepage linkage, and Google has noticed this. The majority of my linkbuilding efforts (whether TLA, social voting, linkbait, whatever) are now aimed at pushing pagerank into the domain through the backdoor.

I can't emphasize this enough. Even if you only pick 2 or 3 subpages of your domain to focus your linkbuilding efforts, you'll get much more bang for your buck. The evidence is pointing to Google considering and weighting *whole domains* as units of measurement as opposed to single pages. Now more than ever, by building into subpages, you are helping your entire domain. The good news is that PageRank seems to flow a whole lot better throughout a site when you bring it in the backdoor.

2. Diversify the location of your links

Stop putting all your links in sitewide sidebars and footers. If you run a WordPress blog, consider doing targeted sidebar links per category as opposed to site wide. Also, consider throwing links around in old posts. Post level links are the most powerful, but take the most work. Text Link Ads now offers the chance to buy links at the post level, and I think it's a great idea.

If you're savvy enough with CSS it might help to change the semantics of your stylesheet div sections. Instead of "footer" you might use "the-end-is-near" ... instead of "sidebar", you might use "we-recommend" ... and instead of "entry" you might use "juicy"

The most important thing is to diversify the location of your links. Sitewide is fine, but only if complimented by a nice dose of post-level links.

3. Diversify your anchor text

The worst thing you can do at this point for linkbuilding is get five sitewide links, all pointed at the homepage, all with the same anchor text. That's a recipe for severely diluting the value of the links you acquire.

Instead, you might get three links into your homepage with anchor text like "Widgets for Wingnuts" , "The Best Widgets" and "Professional Widgets" and then get two links into each category of your site with variations on the category like "Sports Widgets" and "Widgets for Athletes." Doing something systematic like this is a recipe for successfully avoiding the Google Link Buffer.

4. Get article level links from strong sites

Promote your site at places like Digg, Netscape and Reddit. Right now, I have a little secret in this regard that I discovered by being patient. Nothing mind blowing, but it works. I'm willing to share the "secret" with anyone who sends me a private message.

Pssssssst...another secret....Performancing is a strong site that rewards good content with free article level links. Give it a six month try and you're golden.

5. Comment at other blogs

There's good reason to believe that comment level links with the no-follow directive still pass linkjuice. But that's not the reason to comment at other blogs. The real reason is to get noticed, and to get linked to from other participants who think you're one of the cool kids. If you have useful things to say, you'll gain respect and respect almost always turns into free links.

One of the best places to start off with your commenting career is at the Link Nazi's Blog. Lots of people take him seriously, and lots of the cool cats make posts over there. Friends tell me that a single quality comment can yield your site dozens of respectful glances.

Here's a question for you:

Should Performancing have to worry about the consequences of putting 20 outbound links to its top 20 pMetrics blogs in the sidebar?

Google has been known to ding sites for link-lists in the sidebar and footer. Now we all know that blogrolls and whatnot are natural web behavior that should not be penalized. But as we know, Google and the Link Nazi are cracking down on paid links. Will their algo be able to handle something as benign and community oriented as a list of top 20 sites that use our stats program?

Another way of putting this: you know somethings messed up when you're worrying about something as stupid, trivial and foolish as this question.

So what's messed up?