Cheers,
Ellesse

Once I read this I had to say, better be safe than sorry. We’ll see what happens, but I didn’t ant to find out when it was too late.

Unless they have a proper logarithm for tracking the difference, maybe blogrolls will be next in line… shucks!

Cheers,
Ellesse

It seems like the do follow plugin is the next victim of “G”. What they say is that by activating our do follow we invite possible unnatural link building activities since bloggers only might comment because they get a link back to their site – never to be seen again.

In practice, this actually does make sense to me, even though this wasn’t my motivation and I never even thought about this in the specified manner.

So looking at it this way, I don’t think blogrolls would be affected, but then I don’t work for Google and I keep learning new things every day.

Look, I’m happy for you to get such great results with a lower PR and maybe I have to re-think my beliefs in regards to the power of rankings.

I’m in no way a slave to the system as even though I place personal weight on these, I don’t look at them or feel like it is important to my blogging and writing.
As far as I’m concerned I try to write the best possible content that I can and if that gets me ranked higher with those tools, than great.

If I was to loose all my rankings overnight as per your rhetorical question, I would simply keep doing what I do now and find other ways to measure my success.

Personally I feel that an income of $6,000 per blog per month is a fantastic way to become financially independent.

After that – it’s rinse and repeat!

And congrats on your biggest ever comment. I do fell honored in some way and welcome you back any time.

By the way, I hate debating SEO because I believe it’s such a waste of time.

Also, I think my last comment was the longest I’ve ever made on anyones blog!

I really do believe that Google is owning the territory here no matter how we look at it

I also believe that Google commands a lot and will continue to grow along that path. I wouldn’t have become a shareholder, if I didn’t believe that, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to depend on Google solely.

So the way I see this is that high PR does equal high income and a lot of traffic

How? Where’s the traffic coming from and why is it arriving? Where is the income coming from? How is having a high PR going to help to bring in either traffic or income?

I’ve done some work in the SEO field and have a number of clients with websites that rank very well for their targeted terms. From these SERPs, my clients use their websites to generate business even though some have very low PR (think <=PR3). In fact, they even rank better than their higher PR competitors for sought after terms.

Time and time again, I’m seeing that traffic, money and rankings don’t always follow PR. For one, I don’t believe Google’s algorithms are that straightforward and then there’s a website’s individual capacity to generate money to consider. How much income is a PR7 website to generate if the webmaster hasn’t monetised it effectively?

Let’s take my own blog as an example. At its peak, more than 6 months ago, it was a PR5. Now, as a PR3 it brings in more traffic and generates more income than it ever has. I can also see that SERPs haven’t been adversely affected by the PR drop and that it still ranks highly for all of the same terms and even some new ones that it didn’t 6 months ago.

Want an example you can see? When I search for ‘click settlement’ in Google.co.uk, my PR1 blog post about the whole incident appears in position 3 above many other higher PR pages including Google’s own official blog post weighing in at PR4.

I think it is great if you can say I don’t care about Alexa, PR and Technorati, but for me these tools are measuring tools that indicate my blogs growth.

I’ve nothing against measuring tools, but they should remain just that – tools that measure something without interfering.

In regards to your question about what I define as top dollar that is a hard question to answer. because what is considered top by me might be peanuts for somebody else.

Don’t be shy! I was asking for your thoughts on what ‘top dollar’ means so that I can get some context. I sell links across a number of websites and the most each link will cost the advertiser is about $60 (the last time I checked). To me, top dollar links would cost several hundred dollars or whatever the most expensive links are at the likes of TLA.

All I’m trying to say is that I don’t believe that PR is the be all and end all of making money online. I am much more interested in things I have more influence over such as the amount of qualified traffic I can attract.

I don’t believe that people are doing themselves any favours by getting into a mindset that has Google controlling their income.

As all good businesses should have contingency, what will you do if Google do away with toolbar PR or if it stops serving you?

I see where you are coming from with your thoughts and to be honest, I wish I could just say stuff this I don’t care. But I can’t because I really do believe that Google is owning the territory here no matter how we look at it.

So the way I see this is that high PR does equal high income and a lot of traffic. It is a natural evolution over time and really does make sense to me.

I think it is great if you can say I don’t care about Alexa, PR and Technorati, but for me these tools are measuring tools that indicate my blogs growth.

Yes, I can also see this according to my comment count, but this isn’t an indication as many new bloggers have a following with a much higher count (interest dependent)

So I guess I’m a ranking slave in some way or another but I really don’t mind! I personally thrive on seeing those numbers increase and it keeps me going, but that’s just me.

In regards to your question about what I define as top dollar that is a hard question to answer. because what is considered top by me might be peanuts for somebody else.

I shall leave this to everybody’s imagination. :-0