It would be really handy to point a page rank tool to a domain and let it find out all pageranks of all pages on that domain. I recently discovered the page rank tool PaRaMeter (Page Rank Meter) at the German AlterFalter blog from my former colleague Stefan.

PaRaMeter is a page rank tool that can check the pagerank of a selected website. It can also crawl that website and list every page found and check the pagerank of those pages as well.

Another interesting and very handy feature is the selection of the Google Datacenter (or multiple ones) that should check the pagerank of the checked pages. This is useful during pagerank updates because datacenters usually do not run in sync. That would mean that you could spot your new pagerank in a few datacenters while the others display still the old one.

I don’t blame Google for doing this although my website was affected as well. What I blame them for is the lack of transparency. There was no announcement, no blog entry, nothing at all that would shed light into the darkness. Some webmasters changed the layout of their sites and removed paid links and other links hoping that this would be the right move to please the search giant.

Matt Cutts, the head of the Google webspam team, clarified the situation today by writing an email, a short one that is, to Search Engine Journal:

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

The source is trustworthy enough so that it is most likely that the email is legit. What Matt is saying here is that sites were punished because they were either selling links or having forward links on their website.

The explanation why some sites got punished who were not selling links at the time of the punishment was most likely because they were selling links in the past. This was the case for Problogger.com for instance who stopped selling links months ago.

This explains why some Pagerank drops were reversed just a few days later.

Webmasters should be very careful in my opinion, there is no confirmation that this will be the only punishment for websites. It could get worse, especially if Google decides to hurt the position in the Search Engine.

Read More:

Matt Cutts Confirms Paid Links & Google PageRank Update
Google Updates PageRank Again? Adjusts Paid Link Penalty?

I was one of the first adopters when Google released their search engine while all of my friends and colleagues were still using Yahoo or local search engines. I believed in Google, that it was the best and told and convinced everyone I knew that they were the best. The error that I made was that I never looked back, I did not check other search engines to see if they would deliver better results or offer better search possibilities.

I believed that Google is the best. Well, I honestly do not know if their search engine is the best, hearing lots of critics who claim otherwise. It is a fact that spammers do concentrate on Google because most users use Google and not another search engine.

So, what I want to do is the following: I will look at other search engines from now on and use them to see how good they are. Unlike Everton however I do not use a lot of other Google Services. I have a Gmail account but that is not my primary account.

The fact is. Google relies on its dominant market position as a search engine. That’s why they make billions of cash because everyone is using them. I don’t want them to disappear, I just want that the market share is divided fairly among several search engines, not just one.

Read More:

Breaking Google’s Stranglehold On The Internet

It was noted that this is currently a manual process which could explain why it seems to be so random. My site has been hit as well dropping 2 points from PR5 to PR3. I would not care that much if someone would assure me that there would not be any future ill-effects but I do not want to take any risks here.

I decided to remove all paid links from my website which was not that hard because I did not make much money anyway. I can see that this could be a huge problem for guys like John Chow who make thousands of Dollars selling links.

The Webmaster Tools that are accessible if you have a Google Account offer a link on the main page that is entitled Request reconsideration. Webmasters who were punished by Google may ask for an reconsideration if they got rid of the factor that penalized them in first place.

While I’m not sure that this is about selling links and not some general PR drop across the board I don’t want to take chances here. I did ask for a reconsideration and hope that I will receive a positive answer from Google once they checked that my site is no longer selling links.

I’m wondering what those webmasters will be doing who did not get hit until now. It currently really does not matter that much but it could hurt a lot of people if the websites would get penalized further in the Google search engine.

After reading about other incidents he asked Google directly and got the confirmation that this was indeed a drop because of the link selling. While a Pagerank drop might be troublesome for some webmasters who make a good chunk of their monthly earnings from selling text links it might even lead to an exclusion of the website from the Google Search Engine.

This would be catastrophic for many webmasters who decided to live from the revenue that their websites generate. Another Pagerank drop that came to my mind instantly was the drop of JohnChow.com from Pagerank 6 to 5. John is very open minded about his earnings posting a monthy income report on his website.

He made more than $2000 from selling text links in September. If this drop was a penalty for the link selling is not know as of yet but it could be very likely the reason.

Apparently websites hit by a Pagerank decrease may request a review. How and where is not yet know but it could become available as an option in Google’s Webmaster Central.

Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.

A way to report sites that sell links was introduced earlier on as well and it could become common to report the competition if they are indeed selling links.

Will you keep on selling links on your website even with the chance that your site will be penalized by Google ?

Read More:

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
via Google Reducing PageRank of Websites That Sell Paid Text Links

I assume that you want to have a successful blog with great visitors, great comments that add to your knowledge and some money that you would earn from all of this. It does not really matter if you just created a blog or want to improve of what you already have achieved. The first thing would be to write down your goals. What is the purpose of your blog ? Money ? Fame ? Women / Men ? Fun ?

It was very helpful for me to write down certain goals I had for ghacks such as reaching a certain visitor level, a pagerank or a amount of money that I wanted to earn. Write that down but be realistic. I wrote down goals that I wanted to achieve every quarter. It is for instance not possible to say when the next pagerank update will start which means that it does not make sense to have the goal of a certain pagerank in the next 3 months.

After you have written down achievable goals you should take a look at what is already there. How many visitors do you get per day ? What is your pagerank, your income ? The most important aspect in my opinion is the amount of visitors that pay your blog a visit every day which means one of the first priorities should be to increase the amount of visitors.

To do this you have several options. Use a sitemap plugin to submit the blog to google. Once that is done search technorati and sites like blogtopsites for similar blogs. Add the ones that you find interesting to your feed reader. If you have none try a web service such as netvibes to have a overview of all your subscribed feeds. Read the feeds and if you find something interesting write about it on your blog and add a trackback.

This has some advantages. First your link appears on the other blog (if not considered spam) which could mean a backlink and visitors from that blog. The blog owner might take a look at your blog as well and in the best case add it to his feed reader. You should also become a regular visitor to some of those blogs and comment on articles which leads to the same effect. Just make sure you do not spam the blogs with stupid comments.

You could also email some of the webmasters and ask for a link exchange. Don’t expect a link from a pagerank 6+ website if you have a pagerank of 0. This does not happen, take a look at sites with a lower pagerank at the beginning. Some webmasters will link to you even though you have a low pagerank. Quality of articles is almost as important as visitors or pagerank. Play that card. Every knowledgeable webmaster knows that sites with high quality articles will sooner or later receive a good pagerank.

It is also important that you write regular. You do not have to write three times a day but once a day would be fine. You could increase the output once the ball gets rolling or you see a stagnation of visitors. More articles means most of the time more traffic as well.

Talking about advertising. You surely are using adsense on the blog. If not this should be the first to add to it. If properly added to your blog you should make a decent income from adsense. This is highly hypothetical but a figure of 4-10$ per 1000 pageviews can be achieved with some customization. Everton from connectedinternet compiled a nice list of adsense tips. The best ad unit should be near the main content of the individual page.

Adsense is not the only way to make money with your blog. You could try to sell links using services such as text-link-ads which have requirements that your blog has to meet before they accept it. I do not want to get into to much detail at the moment, if you are interested in additional methods let me know and I give you some information.

Last but not least we have the pagerank. I like the pagerank of my website because it makes it so much easier to sell links on my site. You need links from other sites that have a pagerank to increase yours. The best way is to let it grow over time but you could speed it up a little bit by submitting your website to directories for instance. I think the best way is to get mentioned on other blogs.

The best advise that I can give each and everyone would be to keep the ball rolling. It will take time but to see that your blog reaches a goal that you set is a wonderful thing. Better than sex :P