Rian, the blogger behind “RianTalk” accused Marghil of “Macuha – Make Money Online Philippines” of fooling new bloggers. He wrote this:

If you will simply target localized keywords based on his suggestions, then he has the freedom to choose other international target keywords because statistically, he will have lesser competition thanks to your foolishness.

For him, Brother Macuha is just fooling new bloggers by teaching them SEO technique that will only give advantage to his own blog not to blogs of those who followed his advices.

He also wrote this:

I know hidden and deep inside these bloggers’ hearts, competition is the number one thing. And that reason is enough for you not to listen to expert bloggers, at least to some of them.

It seems that he’s telling his readers that Brother Macuha is just guiding new bloggers to a different route so that Brother Macuha can simply avoid such competitions on particular keywords.

My Thought

I agree that lots of experts are trying to make money online from the new bloggers who want to learn the techniques in getting huge traffic from different sources especially search engines, and on making money online from the traffic their blogs have. Some of these experts offer modules but only those who paid them are the ones who can access the materials. Other bloggers wrote ebook, printed books, and released presentations and sold these materials to those who are interested to learn.

However, I disagree on the thoughts written by Rian on his blog that Brother Macuha was just trying to fool his readers for him to avoid the competition on the international traffic from the SERP on particular searches. In fact, I am one of the bloggers who enjoyed the benefits in applying his tips into this blog.

Of course, I do have my own self-learned techniques in optimizing my blogs for particular keywords, but I did not hesitate to use the technique he shared through his blog.

For example… I was already targeting keywords like “sex scandal“, “sex video“, and other popular and related keywords before Brother Macuha suggested the “pinay scandal” keyword. Since he was calling for Pinoy Bloggers to participate his “pinay scandal” SEO experiment, I immediately participated and successfully gained traffic from it.

If not because of his tips and suggestions, I don’t think I could drive huge traffic into this blog from “pinay scandal” searches.

Link Baiting

However, if you’ll investigate a little about the accusation, it was simply made to get backlink from Brother Macuha’s blog. SEO experts called this technique “Link Baiting” and it’s also one of the techniques in getting natural links from other blogs.

However, Mr. Rian is not that good link-fisher by using his blogpost as bait because when he learned that lots of Pinoy Bloggers reacted against his post and defending Brother Macuha’s side, he immediately admitted that he was just link-fishing.

He already got the backlinks from Brother Macuha’s blog. If he tried to stand and defend his accusation against Brother Macuha, then I think, he will still be getting more backlinks from other bloggers, just like what I did on this post.

But psychologically, he’s not yet ready on this. The heat on the discussion melted his ego, and immediately surrendered by admitting that he’s just link-fishing.

Well, I admired him for what he did. He really knew how to apply the advices of other SEO experts on how to get backlinks by link-fishing or link-baiting.

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.

Today, I learned through the press release sent to my email by the Admob that Google is now acquiring the Admob technology. Below is part of the press release:

This morning we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google. I’m obviously excited, and not only for our customers, partners, and employees. I’m excited because I believe this will be an important moment for everyone involved in producing, consuming, or monetizing engaging products on mobile. The truth is that the mobile industry has had no shortage of creative energy, amazing products, and talented entrepreneurs. But until now, it has always felt like those of us involved in this space played second fiddle to our online brethren. I believe that time is over.

Once the deal closes, what will happen next?

Actually, I am worried that everything in Admob will be changed. I am worried that time will come that my Admob earning will drop.

But I am also hoping that this deal will bring me another chances to earn more money from the mobile traffic of this blog.

Are you an Admob mobile ad publisher? What do you think is the advantage with this deal?

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.

Hello Sel,

I am confused if PageRank is really important. In your previous post, you said that Page Rank is not that really important because there are pages with low Page Rank yet ranked at the top of the SERP of Google and then there are pages with high Page Rank yet ranked lower at the SERP of Google.

However, I sense in your recent post that you’re quite happy to learn that your blog got the PR2 again.

Can you please explain why is it that you found it important to have higher Page Rank?

Newbie Blogger

Selboy’s Answer

In my article, “Why Does My Blog’s Page Rank Drop to Zero?” I did mention that the owner of the blog that has been slapped by Google with the PR of zero should not be worried. It’s because there are blogs with low page rank that are ranked high at the SERP of Google, and then there are also blogs with high page rank that are ranked low at the SERP of Google.

However, I couldn’t deny the fact that the Page Rank value showed by the Google toolbar is actually based on the actual Page Rank points of every webpage as calculated by Google.

That’s why I wrote this:

A Page Rank of zero (0) may mean that your link-building campaign is a failure, but it doesn’t mean that you’ll lose all the higher positions at SERP in a specific search.

So, if your blog got the PR of zero, then it is true that your link building campaign is a failure.

Please review my article, “Why does my blog’s page rank drop to zero?“. I mentioned few reasons why it happens.

High Page Rank, Ranked High at Google SERP

Now, since the Page Rank value showed by the Google toolbar is based on the actual Page Rank points of every webpage as calculated by Google, then it is also true that webpages with higher Page Rank are most likely be ranked high at the Google SERP, just like what the Google support posted:

Webpages with a higher PageRank are more likely to appear at the top of Google search results. (source)

What has been mentioned is that “higher pagerank are more likely to blah blah blah…” Which means, the webpage with high page rank has the possibility to be ranked high up at the Google SERP than those webpages with low page rank. But not at all the times those webpages with high page rank are actually ranked high up the Google SERP.

To understand what I am trying to tell you, please consider the example below:

Webpage A

• PageRank: 0
• Optimized with keywords: NDS Games, NDS Emulator, NDS Emulator Download

Webpage B

• PageRank: 5
• Optimized with keywords: Make Money Online, Make Money at Home

Webpage C

• PageRank: 2
• Optimized with keyword: Home Based Job, Make Money at Home

Question #1: From that given example, which of the webpages will be ranked at the top of the Google SERP when searching for “Make Money Online”?

My Answer #1: “Webpage B” got the Page Rank of 5. So with this fact, we can say that there is a big possibility that it will be ranked high up the Google SERP compared to the “Webpage A” and “Webpage C”. “Webpage B” and “Webpage C” are related to each other but “Webpage B” is optimized for the keyword “Make Money Online” compared to the “Webpage C”. Now since we are searching Google with the keywords “Make Money Online”, then Website B will be listed at the top of the SERP, next is the “Webpage C” and the last is “Webpage A”.

Question #2: What about if we will google “NDS Games”, how the webpages are being ranked?

My Answer #2: “Webpage B” and “Webpage C” have higher page rank than the “Webpage A“. However, only the “Webpage A” is optimized with the keyword “NDS Games“. Therefore, Webpage A is most likely at the top of the SERP.

Question #3: Which of the 3 webpages is most likely ranked number 1 if we will google “Make Money at Home”?

My Answer #3: “Webpage B” and “Webpage C” are both optimized with the keywords “Make Money at Home”. However, Webpage B has the PR of 5 compared to “Webpage C” which is only PR2. Thus, “Webpage B” is most likely ranked number 1 at the Google SERP.

Conclussion

To make this post short…

1. A webpage with higher Page Rank has the advantage over a webpage with low Page Rank especially when in a competition over a particular keywords or when they are both optimized on the same keywords.
2. Your blog’s ranking at the Google SERP is affected by the Page Rank and how your blog is being optimized.

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.

However, only this Halloween, when I checked this blog, I noticed a little green thing on the PR bar of the Google Toolbar. Finally, the homepage of this blog has been given a PR2 by Google again.

How about your own blogs?

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.

It’s actually a question that new bloggers are asking especially that there are established bloggers who advised new bloggers to write a long post. There are others who said blogposts should be short because the internet users tend to read short internet articles.

These bloggers who gave contradicting advices are all successful in blogging and making money online through their blogs.

There are also other bloggers who claimed that the length of post is not really important. What is important is the frequency of posting articles into the blog.

So, if you’re new to blogging and you’ve read both these contradicting advices, you will have the tendency to be confused. And this confusion sometimes will lead you to feel bored and disinterested in blogging.

Observations on Successful Blogs

There are already thousands of blogs that exist today that can be considered successful. Few of these blogs are: Steve Pavlina’s blog, Problogger, and Yugatech.

Below is my observation regarding the length of articles published and the frequency of posting those articles into each of the blogs.

1. Steve Pavlina’s Blog

The blog of Mr. Steve Pavlina at http://stevepavlina.com/blog/ is all about personal development. Articles published on that blog are all long which ranges from 2,000 words to 7,000 words (my estimate). Longer articles are posted 3 to 5 days after the previous article was posted, and shorter articles are posted 1 to 2 days after the previous article was posted.

2. ProBlogger

ProBlogger blog of Darren Rowse at http://www.problogger.net/ is a blog that contains helpful tips on how to blog, and how to make money from blogs.

Articles published on this blog are long but not as longer as those articles posted by Mr. Steve Pavlina. Most of the times, an article is published once a day. But there are also times that 2 to 3 articles are published in just a day.

But not all the articles published are written by Darren Rowse himself. There are guest bloggers who write and publish articles in behalf of Mr. Darren Rowse.

3. YugaTech – Philippine Technology Blog

Yugatech blog is owned and managed by Mr. Abe Olandres. He’s considered as the father of the Philippine Blogging. He’s not the first Filipino blogger but he is the first to promote blogging to his fellow Filipinos.

The Yugatech blog can be accessed at http://yugatech.com/blog/. Articles published on it are short that ranges from 200 words to 500 words.

Yugatech has no guest blogger. In other words, all the posts posted on it are believed to be his own personal writing. He is posting 1 to 2 articles everyday.

Conclusion

In other words, whether you are posting shorter or longer articles that are posted on your preferred frequency, you’ll still be successful in blogging, just like these 3 blogs we reviewed above.

Length of Posts or Frequency of Posting?

Length of posts and the frequency of posting the posts are both important to be considered in blogging. But on how long should your posts be and how often you will publish posts into your blog, all depends on the following:

1. Type of your blog

If you are maintaining a news blog similar to the following Pinoy Blogs:

1. Daily Contributor – “Your Daily Contributor on News, Technology, Sports and Entertainment“
2. Showbiz Intriga, Get it from Boy – “Your total Philippine Showbiz Authority! Philippine and Hollywood celebrities scoop and breaking news.“
3. Starmometer – “Your Total Entertainment Blog! The hottest stars and the latest buzz in the entertainment industry, it’s all here! Now on its 3rd year.“

… You are obliged to post at least 1 (short or long) blogpost daily because your frequent readers, especially your subscribers will be looking for fresh news articles from your blog everyday.

But 1 post a day is actually not enough, considering that most of the news blog is multi-topic blog, from Technology, Sports, Entertainment, to Politics and other news topics.

The Yugatech blog that we reviewed above can be considered a news blog which is focused on technology, gadgets and mobile phones.

However, if you’re maintaining a Tips and Tricks blog just like the blog of Mr. Steve Pavlina and Mr. Darren Rowse (both reviewed above), then there’s a tendency that your articles will be longer than those posted in the news blog, because there are things that you need to explain and demonstrate clearly.

But writing longer articles can be time consuming. So, it is also expected that you can’t post articles in daily basis just like what Mr. Steve Pavlina did at his blog.

In Mr. Darren Rowse case, he managed to post article everyday even if those articles are long because he got guest bloggers on his side. In times he couldn’t write article, his guest bloggers are doing it for him.

You can check the articles of the Filipino Blogs listed below that can be considered as tips and tricks blog. Then examine the length of the articles and the frequency of posting them:

1. Millionare Acts – “The Journey to Financial Freedom.“
2. Father Blogger dot Com – “Useful tips on parenting, marriage and blogging.“

2. Design and Structure of your Blog

If you’ll ask John Chow, why the posts published at his blog are longer than 200 words up to 1,000 words or longer, his answer is this:

The reason I do the 200 words minimum is so I have enough words to wrap my Google box ad. If I make a post that has less than 200 words, like a video post, then I will leave out the Google ad.

In other words, you need to consider your blog’s design in deciding how long should your post be. If you think, short posts can ruin your blog’s design and structure then you need to make your posts longer or just enough to keep the design of your blog.

3. The Number of Visitors and Subscribers

Sometimes, it is wastful to write articles everyday if you only have few visitors and subscribers. It’s like producing more cola drink even if your target consumer is only few. So, more products will just be wasted because only few of them will be consumed.

However, we should not forget also that visitors of our blog is not just human. Search engine bots frequently visit your blog too.

So, if your blog is new and has only few visitors, then why not publish 1 article everyday. it will be advantageous to you if you publish at least 1 article everyday because search engines love fresh daily content. And through the search engines, you can gain more visitors and subscribers for your blog.

4. The number of your blogs

If you have lots of blogs to maintain, then it is also impossible to post content in daily basis, especially if you don’t have guest or paid bloggers who could write blogposts in your behalf.

But which is more Important: Length of Posts or Frequency of Posting?

Just like what I said, both the length of posts and the frequency of posting the posts are important. But the Frequency of Posting the posts is more important.

You can post shorter articles or longer articles into your blog as long they contain useful information. It will be fine for your readers or visitors including bots to read shorter or longer articles.

But failing to post articles based on your established frequency of posting articles into your blog will only frustrate your loyal readers, even the search engine bots.

And while coping the need to publish post in your establish frequency, don’t ever forget to publish quality articles… just like what everyone knows, “Quality is better than Quantity.”

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.

When the new bloggers heard me saying during my lecture to them that they really need to learn how to market their blog, they immediately asked, “Is marketing part of blogging?” They thought that soon as their blog is already live, the only job they need to do is write articles and publish them into the blog and nothing else… and then they will just wait for the money to be sent to them by Google through the Google Adsense program.

Well, I couldn’t blame them for having that thought because there are other bloggers who said that blogging is the easiest way of making money online, without making it clear that only those bloggers who have blogs that are successfully marketed, are the ones who feel the ease in making money online by blogging.

If you just started blogging then you should strive hard first in optimizing your blogs, creating content, and then marketing them. Once you successfully done these things, then money will just flow in to your pocket.

In other words, your blogging job doesn’t end up in writing and publishing quality content into your blog. Remember what I already told you before, that a blog even if it contains the best articles in the internet if no one is reading your blog, it is considered dead. (You can read my old post, “5 reasons why traffic is money“)

Thus, you really need to market your blog to gain traffic for it.

Make Your Blog High Quality

Marketing can be defined as “the process of promoting, selling and distributing products. (source: princeton.edu)”

So, if we say “Marketing Your Blog“, it also means “promoting your blog and its content to the internet users.”

But your effort in promoting your blog will just be wasted if you failed to make those who are convinced to visit your blog to stay longer and make them revisit your blog again.

In other words, before you market your blog, you need to enhance your blog first and make it better. But how?

Here’s how:

Write Quality Content.

Everything starts in good and with high quality content. If you failed to write quality content then don’t expect that your marketing effort will be successful.

This is just similar when marketing a cola drink with a bad taste. Let’s say your marketing is good and you successfully made your target customers to buy your bad cola drink. But after they tasted it, did they buy again?

Now, imagine if your blog contains useless content. You might be successful in getting traffic for your blog, but for sure, those visitors would not visit your blog again.

That’s why you need to publish high quality content.

Make Your Blog’s Design Conducive for Learning.

It’s like you’re in a classroom. If the classroom is arranged disorderly pupils would feel sleepy during classes instead of learning the things that the teachers had imparted.

The same it true to a blog with a clutter design. Visitors would feel disinterested and would just exit from your blog without checking your content.

Make your Blog a Search Engines Friendly.

It might be true that your target visitors are human. But it is also true that your visitors are not just human. Search Engine’s spiders visit your blog too.

So, while you’re making your blog attractive and useful to your human visitors, don’t forget to consider your bots visitors.

What I mean is, make your blog a search engine friendly so that search engine’s spiders will visit your blog often, stay longer and in return, search engines will rank your blog at the top position in the SERP.

And you already know what happens next if your blog’s articles are always in the top position of the SERP at any particular but targeted searches.

Ways of Marketing a Blog

I already talked about the ways on how to promote your blog on my previous (old) posts like:

1. How to immediately get traffic for a fresh blog?
2. How to increase visitors of your blog?
3. How to decrease your blog’s bounce rate?
4. Write great content and gain more visitors, earn more money?
5. Drive Traffic to your Blog through Networking Websites?

And all the ways mentioned on those articles are the ones that I want to talk about here.

Now, just in case you feel lazy reading those old articles, here’s the means you need to try in marketing your blog.

1. Adword and other PPC advertising. Advertise your blog through any PPC advertising. You can use the Google Adwords, Adbrite, Kontera, Infolinks, etc..
2. Marketing at Social Networking websites. Make use of the social networking websites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook.
3. Bookmark your blog at Bookmarking Websites. I listed many bookmarking websites at my article, “Make Google Visit your Blog Often.” Make use of them.
4. Join and be Active on Forums. Share your knowledge by answering questions in forums or by joining the discussions in forums. With that, members of those forums will recognize you. And with the help of your “Profile” page and links in your signatures, other members of those forums can visit your blog.
5. Search Engine Optimization or SEO. This is the only technique that can bring thousands daily traffic into your blog. Read my articles about it:
   • What is SEO?
   • Off-site Search Engine Optimization
   • On-Site Search Engine Optimization
6. Commenting to other Blogs. Post useful and relevant comment at other blogs. It is like telling the owner of the blog and its visitors that you are blogger and you have blogs too.

And one more thing: You can post an announcement about the new posts you had in your blog at our Pinoy Blogger Update blog and add your blog at our Pinoy Bloggers Directory.

Conclusion

Once you learn how to market your blog that contains quality content, you’ll realize that “Marketing is the Queen” and “Content is the King“.

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.

Hi Sel! I was observing my blog for several weeks already and I learned that Google is not visiting the blog anymore. My blog is already 3 years old and has more than 3,000 posts. My problem is, how can I direct Google’s spider into my blog so that all my new posts will be indexed and be included on the SERP. Can you please share your knowledge about it?

First of all, I want to thank you for asking this.

Actually, I wonder if Google really doesn’t visit your blog anymore.

Based on my experience, there are times that I thought Google did not visit my blog for the past minutes or hours, especially when the new posted article is not yet included on the main index. The only time that I realized that Google really visited my blog is when I noticed that the cached pages are already updated.

I suggest that you verify first whether Google did not visit your blog recently by checking the cached page of your blog by typing this: cache:www.selaplana.com (just change the www.selaplana.com with the URL of your own blog) on the Google search bar and search it. If the cached page contains the recent posts or recent changes of your blog, then Google really visited your blog.

So you’re real problem is not on how to make Google visit your blog but on how to make Google include your new posted articles into its main index.

I suggest you read my previous article, “Why Does Google Deindexed Some Webpages of My Blog?”

Make Google visit your blog often

If you’d notice that Google did not  visit your blog for several days already, then there something wrong with the impression of Google about your blog.

• Maybe, Google finds out that your blog is not updating at all. If this is the case then you need to tell Google that your blog is still updating and tell Google to visit your blog by making use of the sitemaps through the Google Webmasters Tools and by increasing the number links back to your blog from other websites.
• Maybe, Google considered your blog as “untrusted” website. If this is the case, you need to review the Webmasters Guidelines, correct anything that violated the guidelines, and then request for reconsideration of your blog from Google (check here how).

As far as I know, from time to time, Google will visit your blog for updates as long as your blog is still considered by Google as “trusted” one.

Remember that Google loves blog because blog updates frequently. Therefore, we expect that Google will visit your blog often. How often? It depends on (1) the size of your blog, (2) its Page Rank, (3) how often your blog is updating, and (4) the number of links back to your blog from other websites.

But factors 1, 2 and 3 are actually related to each other.Usually, a large blog has a better page rank and is updated often. Everytime you post new article, readers post new comments, and you edit previously published article, Google immediately visit your blog and updates its index.

Backlinks

The 4th factor, which is the number of links back to your blog from other websites, for me, is actually the best and effective way of directing Google to visit your blog.

Google doesn’t take a rest in finding information in the internet from websites to websites. Everytime it stumbles a valid link, it follows it. And everytime it follows a link, it counts the lead, check for updates, and updates its index.

For example, there are 100 websites that are linking back to your blog. If Google visits these 100 websites in just an hour, then Google will visit your blog a hundreds times in just an hour because it is possible that Google will follow the links from these 100 websites to your blog.

But your another problem is, how can you get backlinks from other websites?

There are actually lots of ways on how to get backlinks from other websites or blogs. But the best way of getting links is by linkbaiting. You can still exchange links from your mates’ blogs and other target blogs, just make sure that you do not over do it or else you’ll reap nothing from the links that your blog got.

Other sources of backlinks are:

1. Press Release. Writing Press Release featuring your product and then submit it into the Press Release directories.
2. Signature in Forums. There are forums that allow its members to establish a link back to any websites through their signatures on every posts they posted on the forums’ thread.
3. Classified Ads. Promote your site to Classified Ad Websites and get free backlinks and at the same time free traffic from classified ads surfers.
4. Guest Blogging. There are blog owners who are looking for guest blogger who can substitute them in blogging at their own blog. Be a guest blogger of them, write quality article for that blog and include link back to your blog. This can be a good source of relevant backlinks for your blog.
5. Profile at Networking Websites. Be a member of networking websites like friendster.com, myspace.com, and facebook.com and include a link from your profile page to your blog.
6. Bookmarking sites. Most of the popular bookmarking sites applied the “nofollow” tag in all their low-profiled outgoing links. But once the number of votes on certain bookmark reached the limit, the “nofollow” tag on the outbound links will be stripped off thus allowing the PR to pass from that page to the target webpage.

Below is the list of bookmarking sites you can use for your link-building campaign:

• PR 9 http://slashdot.org
• PR 98 http://www.bloglines.com
• PR 8 http://reddit.com
• PR 8 http://www.rojo.com
• PR 8 http://www.technorati.com
• PR 8 http://www.connotea.org PR
• PR 8 http://del.icio.us
• PR 8 http://stumbleupon.com
• PR 8 http://digg.com
• PR 7 http://www.bibsonomy.org
• PR 7 http://www.newsvine.com
• PR 7 http://www.nowpublic.com
• PR 7 http://www.linuxquestions.org
• PR 7 http://www.mister-wong.com
• PR 7 http://www.43things.com
• PR 7 http://www.squidoo.com
• PR 7 http://www.blogpulse.com
• PR 7 http://www.blinklist.com
• PR 7 http://www.librarything.com
• PR 6 http://www.feedmarker.com
• PR 6 http://www.blinkbits.com
• PR 6 http://www.clipmarks.com
• PR 6 http://unalog.com
• PR 6 http://www.indianpad.com
• PR 6 http://www.yoono.com
• PR 6 http://wists.com
• PR 6 http://segnalo.alice.it
• PR 6 http://www.linkagogo.com
• PR 6 http://www.rawsugar.com
• PR 6 http://www.kaboodle.com
• PR 6 http://linkfilter.net
• PR 6 http://tailrank.com
• PR 6 http://www.icerocket.com
• PR6 http://de.lirio.us
• PR  6 http://www.simpy.com
• PR 6 http://www.backflip.com
• PR 6 http://www.clipfire.com
• PR 6 http://www.kinja.com
• PR 6 http://popurls.com
• PR 6 http://www.netvouz.com
• PR 6 http://www.spurl.net
• PR 5 http://www.shoutwire.com
• PR 5 http://tweako.com
• PR 5 http://www.givealink.org
• PR 5 http://www.wurldbook.com
• PR5 http://www.beanrocket.com
• PR5 http://www.listible.com
• PR5 http://gibeo.net
• PR 4 http://www.blogmarks.net
• PR 4 http://www.fark.com
• PR 4 http://www.bmaccess.net
• PR 4 http://www.diigo.com
• PR 4 http://ma.gnolia.com
• PR 4 http://www.mecanbe.com
• PR 3 http://reader2.com
• PR 3 http://www.wazima.com
• PR 3 http://socialogs.com
• PR 3 http://www.rrove.com
• PR 3 http://www.plugim.com

Summary

To make it short… you can make Google visit your blog as often as you want by simply getting more websites or blogs linking back to your blog.

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.

For the sake of those who are not yet familiar with the term “Page Rank“… this term actually may mean two things:

1. The website rating system, and/or the rating given to every website or webpage which is named after the Google co-founder, Mr. Page. And it’s the one that I am actually talking here.
2. The actual ranking of a certain web page in the SERP of a specific search.

Okay. If during the recent PR update of Google, your blog was slapped by Google with the PR0 from its former higher PR rating, should you really worry about it?

Actually, there’s nothing to worry about it. A Page Rank of zero (0) may mean that your link-building campaign is a failure, but it doesn’t mean that you’ll lose all the higher positions at SERP in a specific search.

To let you know, there are lots of blogs which got the zero PR but still getting huge traffic from Google. Brother Macuha’s blog is now PR0 but his blog’s traffic remains high compared to mine. The PR of my blog, make money at home, dropped to zero last April 2009 but it is still getting enough traffic from Google.

So instead of worrying and making your self nervous, what you need to do is just follow the advice of Google’s engineer, Mr. Matt Cutts, to focus on writing quality articles rather than being obsessed with the green bar that you’ll see at the Google Toolbar.

I already wrote blogposts about it. Few of them are:

1. Is the drop of your blog’s PR hurting you?
2. What’s with the Google PR?

Review my article, “Make Your Link-Building Campaign Natural” and learn things about better link building. If you haven’t watched the presentation of Matt Cutts during the Wordcamp 09 in US, then better watch it now here.

Then you’ll still ask me, why does my blog’s PR drop to zero?

Actually, the answer to the question is found already in the articles or blogposts I already mentioned above. Like:

1. Google’s Penalty. Google, through Mr. Matt Cutts, warned us already that our blog will be penalized if we are caught selling links just for the sake of PR points. It doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to sell your blog’s links but if you want to stay at the safe side you need to use the “nofollow” tags on the links. And one of the penalty that our blog will get is the drop of PR, deindexed from the search engine or be banned from the search engine.
2. Bad Link Building Campaign. Links coming from the fake network of blogs couldn’t be utilized already. Google penalizes blogs and websites detected as members of the fake blog network by devalueing or setting its linking juice to zero.
   In other words, if youre blog was enjoying the link juices of those blogs in the fake network of blogs  before, then soon as Google found out the real nature of these blogs, your blog will immediately lose some PR points that causes the drop of your blog’s PR from a higher rating to zero.
   That’s the reason why you need to avoid farming links by creating fake blogs. Exchanging links should also be done in moderation because over doing it might cause a penalty.
3. Got the temporary backlinks. There are bloggers who are previously linking to your blog from their own blogs. But time came that they stripped off that link. Others simply added the “nofollow” tag on their links back to your blog. Thus losing link juices that your blog previously enjoying.

And just like what I said above, as long as your blog is still indexed by Google, then you still have the chance to increase your blogs PR rating.

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.

Here’s the screenshot of the SERP when searching for the “www.prc.gov.ph“.

And right below the title of the website, Google placed this comment “Ang site na ito ay maaring makasama sa computer mo (my translation: This site may cause harm to your computer)“.

But what really are the causes why Google considered the PRC’s official website as harmful?

The flag, “This site may harm your computer”, is Google’s way of protecting its users from the harm brought by websites that install malicious codes in the background or the websites that are promoting harmful websites.

In other words, if your website is flagged in the search engine result page, then it only means either of the two: (1) contains or simply spreads malicious codes; (2) linking to a harmful websites.

But in the case of the PRC’s official website, the flag by Google to the website could mean that Google found malicious codes from the website itself especially that the said website offers documents and forms in ZIP and PDF files.

What I means is that maybe some of the files hosted by the site are infected by malicious programs like virus, trojan, worm, etc.

In the Google Safe Browsing – Diagnostic page for www.prc.gov.ph, we’ll find this information:

What is the current listing status for prc.gov.ph?

Site is listed as suspicious – visiting this web site may harm your computer.

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 1 time(s) over the past 90 days.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 89 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 2 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-08-01, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-07-14.

Malicious software includes 4 scripting exploit(s), 4 trojan(s), 4 exploit(s).

Malicious software is hosted on 2 domain(s), including gamemaill.com/, f1y.in/.

1 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including f1y.in/.

This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS9658 (ETPI).

But sometimes the flag is false. Maybe Google identified something from the site as malicious code but in reality it’s not.

However, we still need to check our site just to make sure that it’s really safe because while your site is still flagged by Google, then you might lose a lot of traffic that should be driven into your site.

Remember that when clicking  a flagged website from the SERP, instead of redirecting you to the website, Google will direct you first to a warning page that is shown like the screenshot below:

Those who understand what are written on that warning page will of course decide to return to the SERP instead of visiting your site.

And while you’re losing visitors, you’re also losing income.

In checking whether your site or blog is harmful or not, use a site-advisor tool. Here’s few of the site-advisors I knew:

1. McAfee Site Advisor.
2. Norton Site Advisor.

But the best thing to do is to use the Google Webmasters’ Tools. It’s Google that flags websites in the search results, so it’s Google that can help us identify the file or the webpage in our site where it found something wrong.

Once you checked and corrected the problem, file a reconsideration request at Google Webmaster Central and explain in your letter what have you done to correct the problem and why Google should remove the flag on your site.

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.

You know, I am always working hard so that Google will index every webpage of this blog. And having more than a ten thousand of webpages that are already indexed by Google is quite a success.

But why am I doing this? Why am I trying to let Google index every webpage of this blog?

I’ve been thinking these past days and I realized that the more webpages of this blog are indexed by Google, the more chances that my blog has to top the SERP of Google.

Just imagine if your blog has 100 posts but only 10 of them are indexed by Google. This only means that only 10 posts of your blog have the capability to bring traffic into your blog from the Google SERPs and the other 90 posts are useless.

Now, what if all the 100 posts of your blog are indexed? If your blog’s 10 posts bring 1000 visitors into your blog from the Google SERP, then how much more if all the 100 posts are indexed by Google?

Getting high ranking in SERP of Google is really a competition between webpages of the indexed blogs and websites. And I understand that those webpages that are better SEOed are the ones that will be ranked at top position of the SERP.

To let you know, I targeted a lot of keywords that have large volume of searches. At first I successfully got the top position of the SERP of Google, but as time goes by the competition in getting the top SERP is also getting higher and my blogposts failed to stay on the top position of the SERP.

I haven’t lost hope. I continue SEOing those important posts hoping that one day, they will be ranked high up of the SERP again.

Webpages are deindexed by Google

But the problem is, as I am doing the SEO, other webpages of the blog are being dropped by Google from its index.

There were times that Google revealed that there were 12,000 webpages of the blog that are already in the index. However, this June 2009 I noticed that there were only more or less 8,000 pages of this blog that remained in the Google index.

SEO experts suggested that the possible causes why Google deindex webpages are:

1. Duplicate content within the blog. Google found several pages and indexed them even if in reality those pages were just duplicate contents. That’s the reason why the number of webpages in the index was high. But after Google realized that those are duplicate content, Google immediately dropped those pages from the index.
2. Google Penalty. SEOing a certain webpage should be done in moderation because over-SEOing them will only lead to deindexing of the affected webpages, or the entire website or blog.
3. Google consider those pages untrusted. There are lots of websites and blogs out there that contains malicious codes in which everytime you visit one of them, the code is automatically downloaded and installed into your computer. There are other websites and blogs that are used by blackhat SEOptimizer in linkfarming for their websites being optimized.
   Now, if one of the webpages of your blog looks similar to the mentioned websites, then there is a possibility that Google will deindex the webpages of your blog, or the entire website or blog.
4. Server problem. Some experts said that when Google tried to access a certain webpages of your blog but then failed to access them because of server problem, those webpages will be dropped from the index and consider them “unreachable”.
   This is what I actually noticed too.
   In the Google Webmasters tools, webpages of my blog that are included on the “Unreachable” section are not also included on the index.

Now, our problem is how could we avoided the deindexing process of Google? And how could we made Google index all the the webpages of our blog or website?

Here’s what we need to do:

1. Install a sitemap into your site and make use of the Google Webmaster’s tools. Errors in indexing webpages of your blog are reported once Google finds them, so it can help you a lot in fixing the problems.
2. Make your content unique even if the topic you’re talking in every webpages of your blog is common. The title and meta tags of every webpage should be unique too. This is to avoid being considered by Google as duplicate contents.
3. Avoid being penalized by Google. Make your own linking strategy natural and don’t over SEO your blog. You’ll never succeed in blogging and making money online once your blog is penalized already by a search engine, except of course if you can duplicate the ability of John Chow.
4. Get more quality backlinks and avoid getting links from a linkfarm. Getting backlinks from a relevant webpage and from a high PR domain is considered the best thing for a blog. But links from a link -farm will only harm your blog.
5. Find a better webhost which will host your blog. This is to make sure that every time Google visits your blog and every webpage of your blog, Google can access them, and avoiding the possibility that any webpages of your blog will be included on the “Unreachable” pages.

I think, these five steps can help us a lot so that Google will index 1,000% of the total webpages of our blog. If that happens, then I’m pretty sure that our blog’s webpages will have a better chance in ranking well at the Google SERP in various searches.

And just like what I am always saying… the more webpages of your blog that are ranked well on Google SERP, the more visitors your blog will get…. the more income you’ll gain from your blog.

Advertisement: Send and Receive Money Safely and Easily without exposing your credit card.