PageRank Mood Swings
Hello everyone, I’m glad to announce that Betshopboy.net is 3 months old today! Instead of the weekly review of the blogosphere posted every Sunday, I thought I’d break tradition and do a review of some happenings on this blog in the month of outrageous October.
Layout
I’ve made slight changes to the right sidebar. With the help from Simon of Yeepage dot com, the previous 3rows x 1column Featured Sites section was modified to 3×2 to accommodate up to six 125×125 buttons. For maximum exposure to my sponsors, the section was pushed up to the top fold.
After installing Wordpress version 2.3 using the automatic upgrade plugin, my previous RSS feed ran into problem beyond my comprehension and it simply malfunction. I’ve since deleted the previous feed and created a new feed url. If you are still subscribed with the old feed url, please re-subscribe to me new feed.
Traffic
Admittedly, traffic has not been a strong point of this blog but October saw two surges in traffic when first, the post The 5Es of Essential Blogging received massive traffic from StumbleUpon. The second peak came courtesy of CashQuest readers when a review of this blog was published. At the other end of the spectrum, the blog experienced a complete Outage for 3 days due to unforeseen circumstances, and unfortunately, no one actually noticed the absence and the downtime didn’t make any significant difference.
PageRank
Many bloggers, myself included, have a love-hate relationship with Google PageRank. As much as some bloggers told us to forget about PageRank, or that PageRank no longer matters, the fact is that it still does. The long awaited PageRank update finally got underway, but not before making many high profile blogs saw red. The resulting outcomes made many new bloggers jumped with joy but unfortunately, this blog’s 3 months anniversary party had to be put on hold as it was not invited to the biggest party of the year and got a big fat PR ZERO! After months of hardwork, to say that I wasn’t disappointed by this result is an outright lie. Nevertheless, I got to pick myself up and congratulate some of my friends who got their well-deserved ranking in this round of update.
The TLA button might have thrown you into the class of blogs that received penalties to PR. The general penalty seems to have been -2 or -3, and I’d have thought you’d still be at a 1 or a 2 after that.
I had a discussion with Garry Conn earlier and he also cited the possibility of TLA button causing the penalty. But I’ve seen other blogs with TLA button and they still got PR raised. Nevertheless, I think I better get the button down asap!
I am of the view that pr is now broken, I got all upgrades for all my websites the most surprising being a two month old project now pr 5 and the least linked to page on my company website being pagerank 5. Don’t worry yourself too hard about pr.
I hope this blog with continue to grow and congrats on your anniversary, where’s the rum?
Thanks for your consolation and sharing your honest opinions about your own sites not on par with the PR awarded.
I want to grow together with this community too.
Let me contact Captain Jack Sparrow for the rum…
Don’t worry about it! I’m sure that you just got penalized with me, the Cow, Chow, and everyone else! You probably got a PR2 minus 2 for the TLA button!
Congrats on being up for three months, you’re on your way!
Thanks Court for your wishes as well as your encouragement.
i think your theory could have basis, i had predicted PR of 4, but last minute i got only a 2….
But still luckier than you
Hey Simon
You also think your blog got penalised? I guess it’s good lesson learn for those affected.
TLA was the prime suspect at that moment, i did not actually know that pagerank was coming but i did warn or comment on a few site telling them that they should put the rel=nofollow term on every link that is not made out of a sentence and try to avoid words like featured,sponsors and stuff.All these were words coming from Mr matt cutts himself, its always wise to follow a person who working for google especially in the spam team.
I am not saying i am doing all things the way he expects but my direct text links are all with no follow and the header is changed to cool sites. Banners don’t seem to be a factor because they are not text links.That’s my discovery from all other blogs.
Hi Etienne
Thanks for sharing those tips. If only I’ve known and implemented them earlier.
Well, it’s never too late for getting good tips.
Happy anniversary! So sorry to hear about the PR
Although it’s all speculation, I agree in thinking that the TLA button could have done you harm.
The fact that you have indexed pages is still a positive sign though.
Thanks Deborah!
You and your blog’s success is a role model I wish to emulate.
Happy anniversary!!!!! Time sure passes by quickly, hehe. It’s really sad to see that Google slapped all the good, honest bloggers, especially those of us who have small to medium blogs. The big guys escaped without a scratch. You know, your PR remaining 0 might or might not be because of TLA. In my opinion, you shouldn’t care about PR now as you’ve to wait a whole 4 months (or even 6) for the next update. I mean, what do you prefer more: getting money each month through referalls or seeing the green bar? I would choose the money anytime. Don’t drop TLA. Yes, PR can influence advertising rates, but doing something AFTER the slap is just leaving money on the table…I’m still selling links and will continue to do so, even if Google gives me -10.
Thanks Ruchir!
I understand where you are coming from. The thing is, TLA banner is not bringing in the dough for me. The best option for me is to bring it down, i guess.
Happy Anniversary Betshop Boy!
The last pagerank update gave my blog a 0-4 and I’m not even obessing over PR but I’m still happy about it!
Thanks Dee!
Congrats on your PR4!
congratulations on three months. I think I’m coming up on 1 month now, but still haven’t accomplished much. I’ll be monitoring your progress!Nice looking site by the way.
I cant even believe it. As popular as this blog is, it should have gotten AT LEAST a PR 3. How did your blogspot blog do?
Well, this is life, and it isn’t always fair.
My blogspot blog stays at PR2 and I’ve no complain because it is essentially a sponsored review blog and it probably got penalized.
hello betshopboy! congrates on your 3rd month anniversary! hope everything’s going fine for you beside than this PR 0.
Jean Chia
Hi Jean
Thanks for your comment, you are doing great work on your blog too! PR5, not bad at all.
[...] when we thought we’ve seen the last of Google PageRank mood swings, the big G had other ideas. Earlier, Google went to town bitch slapping blogs selling text-link [...]
[...] when we thought we’ve seen the last of Google PageRank mood swings, the big G had other ideas. Earlier, Google went to town bitch slapping blogs selling text-link [...]
[...] get ranked during the last PageRank update. Seeing how many blogs got Googlerized during the big G’s mood swings earlier, I cannot set realistically measurable PageRank for this blog to attain because [...]