Google PageRank Update & Other Distractions

In case you missed it, Google exported PageRank to its toolbar within the past week. I don’t have an exact date to share, but it should show up on your toolbar. Perhaps you were busy playing with Google + or maybe you simply don’t care — in any case, as much as Google tries to take the wind out of its PageRank sails, the Internet routinely lights up with discussions about this dysfunctional website ranking system.

I’m one of those who pretends he doesn’t care about PageRank, but in reality I do. Back in 2005, when I launched by “The Article Writer” website, it quickly zoomed to PR6. I never could figure out why it jumped so high, but eventually it fell back, dropping to PR2 or PR3 before returning to PR4 more than a year ago, the number where it remains today.

Up, Down or Unchanged

I manage several websites and immediately visited those sites including ones owned by clients. Beginning with this website, I noticed a drop from PR4 to PR3, but I believe that ranking to be largely deserved — I neglected the site from mid-February to late June, going with guest posts only when I posted at all. Personally, I would have spanked the site harder and knocked it down another notch.

My main automotive website at autotrends.org is now ranked PR4, which is up one notch while wordjourney.com is also up a spot and is now ranked at PR3, where it was more than a year ago. Most other sites stayed the same, although I must inform a customer that one of his sites, which was ranked PR4 last year and then fell to PR2, is now ranked at PR0. I’m not certain why, but I think there is an ad issue that could be causing a problem. Hmmm….

Search Engine Optimization

Regardless of whether PageRank were to officially be killed off or not, there are some things you can do to optimize your website. For my two sites which increased in rank, I will tell you that I worked hard to write articles that people have linked to, including detailed book reviews, product reviews and news items. I didn’t take those steps to help improve PageRank, rather to increase each site’s visibility and strength online. I write with my readers in mind, which is the best way to get acknowledged for what you do. SEO is grand, but readers won’t bother with your site if what you write is poorly written, boring or both.

Another method I took advantage of is to send updates to Facebook and Twitter for my busiest websites. I just started doing that for this website, so I fully expect that I’ll be at PR9 real soon. Just kidding.

Funny, I should have known that something was up when I started to get a rash of link exchange requests for my “Auto Trends Magazine” website earlier this week. As before, I’m not into link exchanges, preferring to call out worthy content naturally as part of links within an article or at the end of each article in a “Resources” or “References” section.

Related Articles

• What is page rank and why is it important? (marketing.yell.com)
• Google’s Comment Patents and How Pages’ Web Rankings Might Be Influenced by Commentors’ Reputations (seobythesea.com)
• Beyond Alphabet Soup: 7 Post-Panda Tips for Online Merchants (vendio.com)

The New Age of Article Marketing

By Neil Jones

Article marketing has always been one of those tried and tested marketing mediums that has stood the test of time. With the constant changes that are evident in the online world and the new and sexy marketing methods being introduced daily, article marketing is still firmly rooted as a stalwart for website promotion.

But as competition in the online marketing industry has grown the ability to generate large amounts of traffic from articles submitted to directories has significantly dissipated. It wouldn’t be uncommon for one article to receive fewer than 10 views each month, revealing that article marketing might be losing its effectiveness. But guess what? At this very point in time there are marketers who are generating five figure monthly incomes from article marketing alone. Article marketing is still alive and kicking!

However, these marketers are utilizing an innovative technique to drive traffic to their sites through the use of article directories, a technique that defers from the traditional article marketing methodology. In this post I will reveal to you what this technique is and why it so effective.

What is the new age of article marketing?

Traditionally, article marketing was used to drive traffic to an internet marketer’s site from articles submitted to directories like Ezine Articles. In today’s environment this isn’t effective as the traffic generated is less than acceptable. For a marketer to succeed with this method he/she will have to submit 5-10 articles a day to receive a respectable amount of traffic from the directories.

The new age of article marketing goes against this trend and relies on article syndication. Article syndication is when an article you’ve written is picked up by other webmasters and published on their sites with proper attribution (links to your site to credit you). What these 5-figure article marketers are doing is basically writing an informative, engaging, and compelling article and submitting it to the top article directories. These articles are then used as web content, or newsletters by webmasters who feel the content will add value to their visitors or subscribers.

The power of this strategy is that one well written article can be syndicated to hundreds of traffic intensive websites. And this will result in traffic being generated from unlikely sources. Beside the traffic there will also be a number of strong backlinks that are built as well. An article written for syndication will have to follow certain criteria:

The article should:

• be engaging, value-adding, and informational
• not be hyped or “salesy”
• not be written to generate a click as a sales letter will

Article syndication does have its disadvantages as well and very often an excellently written article will go unnoticed, but don’t let this deter you as perseverance is the key to success using this model.

When your articles are re-published on other sites you will have the opportunity to form a relationship with the webmaster who published the article and this will lead to a greater amount of opportunities. You will find that the webmaster in question will begin re-publishing your articles more often when you have established a relationship with him/her.

And don’t forget: the traffic that you acquire from your republished articles will be passive in nature. This will result in a never-ending flow of traffic to your site, which will equate to multiple streams of passive income.

Author Information

Neil Jones specializes in launching ecommerce sites and is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe this company is on course to become one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers like the Motorola MC75 and Zebra ZM400. Neil has been an online marketer for the past six years, and has owned and run a range of ecommerce sites.