Of course Google PR matters! That’s why there are so many tutorials, tips and tricks about PageRank!

Do you think so too?

The events of the past couple of months surrounding DragonBlogger.com have radically changed my opinion of Nominal Google PageRank, more commonly known as toolbar PageRank or simple PR. In the first update since May 25th 2011, the homepage PageRank of DragonBlogger.com was reduced from PR4 to PR0. In the second update since then, it was again increased from PR0 to PR2 (in the past week!).

Now, let us see how that affected (or not) the blog’s traffic.

DragonBlogger Traffic Stats - Pageviews - May-2011-July-2011

If anything, there was an increase in blog traffic during the time the PR went down from 0 to 4!

While there are several factors (apparently hundreds!) affecting the search ranking of pages, Google PageRank has always been considered to be an indicator of the quality of inbound links to a page/website/blog. Clearly, the concept was wrong, and PageRank is now more volatile than ever. For one, if you increase the number of outbound links suddenly, there is a sharp fall in PR. That is probably what happened with DragonBlogger.com.

Google itself, through Matt Cutts, has declared that webmasters and bloggers should focus more on creating quality content and relevant inbound and outbound links organically in order to rank well on Google Search, rather than dwelling on Google PageRank! There is no longer any hint of doubt that PR is a very minor factor in search rankings, and is not a very reliable indicator of a website or blog’s authority. Visitor Traffic is really the only statistic we all should focus on, and use it as a feedback for out efforts in optimizing the blog/website.

If needed, you could also rely on Google Webmaster Tools to get a good picture of the number of inbound links and their details apart from search exposure of your pages. Recently, +1 activity has been added to Google Webmaster Tools.

What do you have to say about the importance of Google PageRank and its impact on Search Ranking/Traffic?

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My Rock Along Productions blog turns out has a PR of 4:
http://www.rockalongproductions.com has Google PageRank 4 out of 10

Yet my This Blog, my Poetry Blog Wanderer Thoughts and my personal blog Justin Germino have PR of 0.

What doesn’t make sense is Dragon Blogger has over 300 unique visits per day, over 8500+ external links on Google WebMasterTools, yet Rock Along Productions has barely 200 external links, less than 50 unique visits per day.

This only confirms that Google Penalizes you for doing paid posts (Rock Along Productions is a company blog and I don’t do paid advertising on it).  But I don’t do paid advertising on the poetry blog either, so not sure why that is so low (maybe too new of a blog).

Also linking to other blogs hurts your blog PR, as the “SEO Juice” from a previous post, you leak your PR to other blogs reducing your own by creating too many links out.  Again, I am trying to figure out how to get around the vicious double edged sword.

Does anyone actually qualify for the like $60.00 or $100.00 paid opps on PayPerPost and do the post and still retain a PR of 5 or higher for most of these post requirements?

Just some stuff I am thinking about.

-Dragon Blogger

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In summary, every single paid or sponsored post you do, you need to try and use a rel=”nofollow” inside the link itself. If you do SocialSpark or PayPerPost links you will find that they automatically have the <a rel=”nofollow” right at the beginning of the link, but PayU2Blog does not, and I am certain that by me doing 8 PayU2Blog Posts with links to the sponsor’s without rel=nofollow is why my Google PR was whacked from 2 to 0.

By default when linking to any other site, unless it is a fellow blogger that you want to give “props” to.  Make sure you use a “nofollow” tag.  This appears to be the consensus from what I can determine by reading over 3 dozen web sites and scouring the web the last few days on Google.

Google is especially sensitive to paid posts and doesn’t like Text Link Ads (that aren’t Google’s own Adsense).  I am still learning more my friends and attempting to make my blog more “Google Friendly” yet still qualify and monetize my blog.  It is a catch-22 when many opportunities on SocialSpark and PayPerPost require your blog to be a PR of 3 or above, and yet you lose your PR if you do paid posts.

How Ironic

-Dragon Blogger

• Update

Just a note to my readers, PayU2Blog prohibits adding nofollow to the links in their paid advertisements.  I had asked them prior to doing anything.  I am sure you can add nofollow after a certain “archive period” of time has elapsed, but don’t use nofollow on new paid assignments.

No related posts.

Makes it hard to figure how to monetize your blog when many paid opps require a PR of 3, 4 or 5+ and yet to do paid opps you lose your PR.  Kind of like a double edged sword in my opinion.

So I am stuck just doing my promotion and networking as usual, my paid opp’s have dried up at this point.  Gonna be real hard to make some extra money this month it would seem.  However, I am not going to be discouraged, I enjoy blogging and would do it even if there was no way to make money at it.  I am hooked now and doing it for the enjoyment of doing it, and meeting new people along the way.

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My IZEARank is <400, my Alexa rank is 300,000 3 month average and <150,000 1 week average.  So what gives, how does something like this happen?

The bad thing is now my blog won’t qualify for many of the opps that require PR2 or above, so my blog goals just got a lot harder to achieve.

So, go ahead my fellow bloggers, rant here about your Google Pagerank story.  Who else has been burned?

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