The Google Punishment has been handed out
Some people got slammed, while others stood still. Many of the top bloggers had their PR devalued 2,3, and 4 points!!!! The consensus is due to selling text links! Google gave the punishment in the form of a hand edit.

Some went from PR 6

To PR 4

What does the blogging community think?
Many blog headlines proclaimed, “PR is dead!” Others shrugged off the PR adjustment and told us to focus on the traffic volume. In other words do not worry about PR, worry about how much traffic is going to your site. Did this update effect the amount of traffic Google is sending? If not, don’t worry about it.

What’s my take?
It was known months ago Google would take action against sites selling links. Therefore, I guess this should not come as a surprise to the offending sites. I have stated for years that PR means nothing in relation to rankings in the SERPs.

I have repeated, like a broken record, people should not worry about PR and PR updates and focus on creating quality content and getting more links.

The Broken Record
Once again, stop thinking so much about PR values!! It ‘s just a time waster and will not help you move your business forward, period!

Moving forward.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a diverse traffic sources for your site. If your business is dependent on traffic from any of the major search engines, exclusively, you really need to rethink your business model. You are at risk!

Just like investing, you need to diversify your traffic sources. So when Google updates their algo and you traffic disappears over night, you are not out of business. It’s like having a six legged table. If you kick out one leg the table will still stand because there are 5 more pillars to hold it upright.

Time to focus and grow your Business
Focus on building pillars and not the antiquated Google Page Rank.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, PR, text links, Google, traffic volume, SERPs, quality content, search engines, Google Page Rank

I mentioned in recent posts my switch from the Flock browser to Firefox. Well, today I got a nice little SEO surprise. I was reading a post on SEOBook.com and found a wonderful plugin for SEO information returned in your search results.

I tried the plugin, both for Google and Yahoo SERPS. The results are great!!!

Check out the screen shot.

Feature Standouts

• Traffic estimator - (I really like this feature.)
• PR of indexed page
• How many links in Yahoo and MSN, including .edu break out
• Directory listings
• Whois – on click away.

Go here to get the Firefox plugin.

Technorati Tags: SEO, SEOBook.com, plugin, Google, Yahoo, SERPS, Firefox

Are paid text links good or bad?

It depends on who you ask? Ask Google and it’s bad. Ask a “white hat” SEO and your answer will vary. I watched a youtube video of Shoemoney taking Rand of SEOMOZ to task over his stance on text links. Basically, he “outed” a couple of sites using text links to increase their rankings, but at the same time he also advises his clients to use text links. Strange? Get the whole story here.

Bottom line for me, Google doesn’t like text links as a way to gain SERP ranking, but they are fighting a losing battle. You can always take your chances… or not.

Technorati Tags: Google, white hat, SEO, Shoemoney, Rand, SEOMOZ, SERP ranking

UC Berkley has put many of their video-taped lectures online using youtube.com as their delivery platform. I found a lecture by Sergey Brin co-fonder of Google, discussing search engines and the Google Algo. He does a high-level history of search, Google’s algorithm and Adsense. This is very interesting stuff. Check out UC Berkley’s youtube page here.

This is the video:

Google’s “mission” at the beginning was, “Search for Kings.” Not to find a king, but create a product what is worthy of a king’s attention. Customer and product comes first! Love it! This is core to a successful business.

Check out the lecture below:

Technorati Tags: UC Berkley, video-taped, youtube.com, Sergey Brin, Google, search engines, Algo, Adsense, Search for Kings.