OK, I think a more descriptive and appropriate title would probably be something along the line “Google shouldn’t have given my PageRank back when I’m still selling Text Link Ads!” LOL.

While some claim that the long awaited update took place on March 2nd 2008, it didn’t seem to have any affect on my blog until recently. I first noticed my PageRank value was no longer zero last Friday after I made some changes to my blog.

There has been a lot of buzz around the blogosphere and forums about the recent changes in PageRank and backlinks counts from Google

From where I am sitting, I can see that Google is getting tougher towards those selling text link ads and paid reviews. It appears that Sabahan.com is penalized again for selling text links, and this time around my PageRank has been reduced to 0.

Personally I think PageRank is important but not as important as the amount of traffic you get. For example if 10K unique visitors stop by at your blog daily, and you are making tons of money from them, do you really care about your PageRank? I don’t.

I haven’t been able to post anything for over a week because something came up and I needed to take care of it right away. Anyway, since I’ll be away from the computer again tomorrow I guess it’s best to spend sometime writing to let you guys know that I am still alive and kicking

While browsing my RSS feed on a lazy Sunday afternoon looking for something to write about, I saw a post by Matt Cutts which I thought you should know especially if you are doing paid reviews.

That’s right, somehow Google own video sharing website has suffered a major drop in PageRank after the recent shake up. From where I am, currently it’s a 3. The Future PageRank tool also indicates that the value is consistent across all datacenter.

I don’t recall YouTube selling text link ads, so obviously Google is looking at other areas when deciding whether a site’s PageRank should be reduced.

If it’s not a glitch, perhaps Google had decided that YouTube is no longer an important website for whatever reason and therefore doesn’t deserve the high PageRank.

I’ve been experiencing a terrible Internet connection since yesterday and probably unable to post lengthy post for now. I’ve called Streamyx last night but I was disconnected after going through all the ‘mandatory’ troubleshooting for 20 minutes. Yea, that’s a ‘great’ TMNet customer support that you come to expect.

I am on the phone with them right now.

Anyway, apparently Google is doing a second round of the PageRank shake up and according to HTNet, Sabahan.com is now a 3. I can’t check this myself because my connection doesn’t even load Sabahan.com main page properly. (Update - yes that’s seem to be the case)

For the past few weeks, news about blogs losing their PageRank has been widely discussed around the blogosphere. Besides this blog, several of my other blogs weren’t spared either.

This had affected almost everyone regardless of the quality of their content which includes big names such as JohnChow.com, AndyBeard.eu, Yaro Starak’s of Entrepreneuers-Journey.com.

I think it’s important to be aware that there are actually two different types of PageRank. One is the actual one that Google uses internally to rank a page and the other one visible on the Google toolbar. The reduction in the visible PageRank may affect a site’s text links price but based on Google’s internal PageRank value, the site should continue to rank just as it always been. Then again, an over zealous link selling promotion would definitely affect the rankings eventually.

After I published my previous post, I noticed from my user’s online page Googlebot came munching the content almost immediately.

If you Google the term “latest google pagerank update Sabahan” you will notice that the post appears first on the list, but that’s besides my point.

When I did the search at 9:30PM, I noticed the post was indexed 7 hours ago as shown in the screenshot below. That’s about an hour after I published the post at 1:30PM. It appears that now it takes Google about an hour or less to index my post.

If you depend on Google for 90% of your website traffic, the consequences of losing that traffic when your site is removed from Google can be devastating.

It’s even more so if you are making a living working on the Internet. All the long hours you had put in seems meaningless. Watching your cash flow dries up can be a real blow to your motivation, I know, I’ve been there.

But before we go insane over the whole debacle, take a deep breath and calm down. There will always be an explanation as to why your pages disappear from Google.

In my previous post I wrote about a problem I had where many of my sites were suddenly removed from Google search result pages.

It was ‘unsettling’ to say the least because I could had easily lost hundreds of dollars per day from AdSense and affiliate programs that depend on Google organic traffic during that debacle.

I found it strange to see Googlebot repeatedly spewed the robots.txt unreachable error or Network unreachable errors via my Google Webmaster Console when I was absolutely sure that my server uptime had been nothing but one hundred percent during the period.

The on-page factors form part the hundreds of criteria used by the search engines to rank a page. In the absence of significant off page factor advantage, a good on-page SEO practice will help your pages to rank better than your competitors.

On-page factors are elements on a web page that the search engines weight differently when deciding where to rank your page in the search engine result pages.

These elements include the page title, headlines, alternate image descriptions, anchor text, keyword density and so on.