Earlier this week I posted a couple times about the Google PageRank shakeups that had taken place, and made it clear that I supported Google’s right to do as they please with their index, even if I thought penalizing web sites like they seemed to be doing was a bad decision for Google to make. And I thought that was the end of it for me.
Then a funny thing happened… this blog, which has had a positive page rank for the past year and which wasn’t affected by the recent “link sellers” penalty (and why would it be since I don’t sell links here–in fact I give them away free for related content at the bottom of every page), suddenly appeared to have a page rank of Zero this morning.
Isn’t that strange? Several days after everyone else had their rankings “updated”, and also coincidently after I posted that I thought Google had blundered on this whole thing, my blog loses all of its ranking. Hmmm….
A lot of people speculated earlier this week that these penalties were being manually dished out at Google, but I thought that seemed a little too “conspiracy theory” to give it much credit, but now I do have to wonder.
Okay, wondering time is done. I don’t know why Google decided that the content on my blog that it felt was valuable for the past year suddenly isn’t so valuable, and I don’t care.
I don’t write or work for Google. Unlike a lot of web masters, I’ve never allowed myself or my sites to rely on a single source (Google) of traffic. In fact, the majority of my blog traffic comes from various social and blog networks, and of the little search traffic I do get, Yahoo sends the most to me with Google and MSN fighting month after month for second place.
So seriously, if Google doesn’t want to play in my yard anymore I’m cool with it. Especially after seeing the way Google’s been turning on their long-time friends lately–I mean, who needs friends like that anyway?
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I like your take on the PR situation. Many like bowing down to Google which is definitely no a good thing. It is crucial that you diversify your traffic and income sources so that when somebody tries to throw a punch you won’t be severely impacted.
You know, I learned at a young age to never put all my eggs in one basket and that’s sound advice when it comes to customer reach for any business.
We have no real control over how any search engine will or won’t treat our pages, so it doesn’t make much sense to rely too heavily on them.
Search engines have their place and uses, but they (and specifically Google) aren’t the Holy Grail of traffic and success that a lot of webmasters seem to idolize them as.
The datacenters have been down for a day. I wonder if there are even more penalties being dished out right now.