Has  your  PageRank  recently  tanked?

A lot of people have the hump with Google today.Snoskred  put together a little compilation.

Google Goes after the Everyday Blogger
ZeroRank - More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)
ACCC alleges misleading and deceptive conduct by Trading Post and Google
PayPerPost Scrambling - Trying to Implement “RealRank” After Their Bloggers Page Rank Disappears
Selling Text Links Without Getting Into Trouble
OK, Google… They Surrender
Goodbye Google
Page Rank is now Pointless
Stock Tip of the day - sell Google!
So The G-Gods Are Smiting Bloggers Again
My De Riguer Nod to Google
Your Tip For The Day.
Dear Google…..(I surrender)
Spank - Part 2
Stock Tip Alert! SELL GOOGLE NOW
What the heck is going on with pagerank?
Anti-Google Claims: To Reply Or Not?
How To (Kind Of) Buy A #1 Organic Search Ranking On Google
The US Search Engine Optimization Market
Google’s Page Rank Update Increases Profitability of Selling Text Links
Google’s PageRank: A Double Edged Sword

SEO is not the wysiwyg thing we’d all like to believe

SEO - the process of search engine optimisation as we’ve all come to know and love may appear to be about cause and effect but is it really so?

Whilst it’s nice to think that our seo efforts are a simple case of do action x, wait, montitor record, rinse repeat/reduce the reality is very often, much, much further from the truth.

Do not believe the lie of the algorithm

SERP’s are a monitored thing - do not believe that it’s an algorithmic thing. It is not true, it really is not.

Lately I’ve found myself looking at this blog an thinking, god Rob you moaning whinging whining minnie.

I want to say something positive and talk about opportunities that exist for people who like to blah blah blah.

Everyone already knows about Google Adsense, so I’m not going to talk about them or any other program too specifically but I may include a link or two to a couple of others that I use and have found to be ok.

As some of  you may have noticed, I’ve been having database problems. If I’m not ‘here’ then you know where I’ve gone. To say it sucks is an understatement.  I’m able to login in at the moment but for how long is another issue entirely.

Some of you might have heard of a website named Flickr. I like flickr its a cool little place to share your photos or store them online, anyhow…did you know that you can also access these pictures and add them to your blog posts?

The code below will show all images that have been tagged sunny

<p id=”flickr_badge_wrapper” align=”center”>
<script src=”http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?count=5&
display=latest&size=s&layout=h&source=all_tag&tag=sunny” type=”text/javascript”></script></p>

This how it looks when outputted to the blogpost 5 small horizontal images.

You can specify,horizontal,vertical by picture size and number too.

Here is the same keyword but larger and with only one image specified.

Luigi the Blacksmith

I’m reminded of a joke that talks about a blacksmith named Luigi who lived in the Welsh Valleys. Luigi was complaing about a nickname he had acquired and how his reputation had been damaged. All his long life he had worked hard as a blacksmith, fitting new shoes, looking after the horses of the farmers and the gentry, he really thought it unfair that he should be labelled in the way that he had. “20 years a blacksmith, I’m Luigi the Blacksmith, 2 minutes with a sheep and I’m Luigi the sheep shagger”

Maki wrote a good blog post today that for me spoke about marketing and creating things of value that have the efffect of creating converted users; that’s, people who will buy into whatever it is you do or are trying to achieve.

Be it via a comment, a hit of a subscription button, an add to favourites action , a credit card transaction or a link through to what you wrote or advertised, the bottom line is that without any of these sorts of actions, the likelihood is that you are either writing for yourself or selling something that is overpriced and overvalued or just not worth discussing.

Not another paid links post (groan)

The whole paid links are evil for Google idea has been around for some time now. This isn’t a rehash of those. I want to pass comment on how lately that there’s been a lot of Google ill feeling going on, with an increasing number of prominent people speaking out against them. I say ill feeling as hate is too strong a word. Practically all of it is related to the whole paid links and nofollow thing.

Matt Cutts in a recent interview said that Google does allow PageRank to flow through noindex pages. If you have pages on your wordpress install that add little value to your readers and you’d like to prevent them from being indexed, then you might want to take that into account.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

I was going to post this in a comment at Sphinn, but decided to blog it instead.

It related to Google and how they apply penalties to sites who talk about or do things in ways they don’t like. Some people think Google doesn’t penalise for paid links, I disagree, as the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

Anyhow, this post isn’t completely about paid links, its more about the whole penalty process and the culture that allows it to happen and how it’s just very dificult to challenge or do anything about even.