Google PageRank Update February 2013

Google Toolbar has once again changed the green painted color. PageRank which is indeed a great link analysis algorithm has been refreshed and websites are now ranked again on the scale of 0-10 based on the quality backlinks. This latest Google PageRank update took place today i.e. 4th February 2013 as expected. Google rolls out a PR update on quarterly basis which means websites are ranked on a scale of 0 to 10 after every 3 months. The last update was on November 2012 and just after three months a new update was rolled out. For over two years, despite thousands of backlinks (over 7,800) our blog maintained a PR 4.0 and just today Google was generous enough to finally take us to the next level. We have Alhamdulillah attained PR 5.0 and it's indeed a great motivational feedback from Google. There are reasons why our PR did not increase for such a long time. For the past three months we had been working on a strategy that really played well and I will be sharing all these details today.

It dates back to 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey brin first brought their paper formula's to public. PageRank is the backbone of Google and it's the major functionality that differentiates it from other Search engine giants like Yahoo! and Bing. It is an effective Page Popularity algorithm that keeps track of all incoming backlinks to a page in a safe record. Whenever search robots crawl your pages they count the number of incoming links pointing your web page and also keeps track of the number of links pointing from your web page to other niche sites. Based on the quality and not quantity of backlinks, the PR algo scales sites between integer values starting from zero to 10. For a normal blog, PR7 is the maximum achievable rank, for corporate blogs PR can go as high as 9 or 10. 

PR differentiates low quality websites from good content publishers. The more quality links or recommendations a site receive, the higher the chances are for it to attain a high PR.

Websites that are referred or recommended via backlinks rank higher in PR scale and get the benefit of faster crawl and index rate. Sites with higher PR are crawled faster compared to those with lower PageRank. For instance a PR 6 webpage is crawled several times per minute compared to a PR 4 page that is crawled once every minute. The faster the robot crawls your page the greater the chances for you to drive organic traffic and hit headlines in SERPs.

I have always advised new comers to rely only on their post frequency and quality of their topic selection. Its solely readership that counts first, rankings come second. A good PR does not guarantee that you will receive an exceptional treatment from Google in terms of Traffic. High PR does surely increase crawl rate but SERP ranking is based on a total different criteria. For your page to hit high on Google's first page, you must focus on nothing but trending topics. Think and act as a journalist and never share out-dated news. Be unique in your style and keep sharing content that may offer something new and different.

In my 4-year blogging experience I have seen several PR2-PR3 websites receiving much more traffic then PR5-PR7. The reason being one i.e. Right selection of topics and Quick publishing skills. Succeeding with online traffic is just like taking part in Rabbit and Turtle race - the slightest slumber could push you way back.

So in our priority list, PR comes fourth in the success queue.

Readership First          (i.e. Posting quality content) Revenue, trust and respect in the eyes of online community and internet marketing agencies rely mostly on readership. No one can judge how much traffic you receive per day. People estimate your traffic from your fan following count and then rankings. If we have to compare ALEXA and PR, then my vote will always favour ALEXA, for reasons explained in the post below.

In short do try your best to get good PageRank for the purpose of achieving good crawl and index rate. But do not become a victim of a false belief i.e. High PR means high Traffic

As you may already know PR is never sequential and neither dependent on the quantity of backlinks. If you have PR4 today then don't expect PR5 on next update because if you don't carefully follow the SEO guidelines then your PR could drop too.

I have already explained three important fundamental reasons on why a PageRank doesn't increase for a website and I will be sharing yet two more reasons today.

For the past two years we were carefully choosing products and we would write a quality 1K word review on it with three paid links. The income was really impressive and that motivated us further to accept more reviews. Most of these products were related to our niche so we thought may be we were not doing something weird but I failed to realize that Google's artificial intelligence is way ahead of us all now.  Google carefully keeps a record of websites that sell products and marks every single link pointing to them. These websites include sites like web hosting companies, merchandise sellers,  software vendors, electronic dealers etc. A nofollow link pointing to them would never cause you harm but a dofollow link would decrease your importance in the eyes of Google. Promoting such product sites is a great risk and therefore we have stopped practicing this bad hobby permanently. The result was such that the moment we stopped this practice, our PR jumped high. We had always doubted this practice and our doubts are now a fact.

For sites which promote revenue sharing programs and accept guest posting, PR would remain constant for them too because every single out-going link in those guest posts leaks out half of your PR juice.

We have therefore stopped accepting both reviews and guest posts. The result this time was somehow expected and we knew that the PR would certainly change. Alhamdulillah the right decision played well in our part.

Must check:

Receiving a high PR is surely not as difficult today as it was 3 years ago. The community has grown pretty generous now and you have several platforms where you can place your link. You are no more limited to article directories and painful forum registrations. In our SEO package, I always suggest clients with a PR boosting formula that is based solely on common sense.

The formula revolves around guest posting. Nothing works well for PR except few quality guest posts. Now the main question is how to reach some generous web masters who may accept your guest posts and provide you a juicy backlink.

You will need to build strong mutual relations with 3-4 of your favorite blog admins on daily or at least weekly basis. You will first need to win their trust. Once you succeed in drawing their attention, you can then ask them for a guest post without any hesitation.

Follow this quick strategy:

Quick PR Formula:

Select 3-4 niche high PR blogsComment daily or on alternate days on these blogs by leaving a useful and sense-full comment. Do send them feedback and suggestions via their contact form once a weekReport to them any Copyright violation you may observe - They will love you for this!Build a family type relationshipPractice this for 2 months.When the time is right, send them a polite request for a guest post.Make sure your blog is well designed, presented and contains at least 50 posts. You must provide a solid reason so that the author may offer a link. Make your Post of at least 1K words Make your post presentable, sound mature and to the point Never try to promote yourself or your brand on a guest post, talk about the topic only. Add images and video to make the post stand out No one would neglect such a great post from a loyal reader. Try it! :) 

We are listing old and coming updates below along with our PR status on each update:

With all that said, tell us what is your PageRank update status? Feel free to ask for any suggestions if needed. If you experienced a PR dropped then do not loose hope and keep working on your brilliant content and if in case your PR increased then you should be extra careful to utilize it well and avoid all bad practices.  I wish all the best to every new comer who are gifted with a PR increase and request them to work with even more zeal and enthusiasm. Wish you more power buddies. Peace and blessings always! :)

Filed Under: Google, News, SEO

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Update: 150,000 Monthly Page Views – STILL No Backlink Building

You may remember my post from last August titled 100,000 Monthly Page Views & No Backlink Building.

So I wanted to update you on the traffic to my hidden WordPress website I created in 2011 that I have been using to test how much organic traffic I can build without chasing backlinks.

It’s been six months since that post and the traffic has increased by roughly 50,000 page views per month and you can see the comparison screenshots below…

Email subscribers: click here to view the screenshots if you cannot view the images.

August 2012

February 2013

Since the last post in August, I’ve added roughly 20 pages.

For the record, a few people were suspicious/curious about the tool I’m using to track the traffic because they didn’t recognize the above graph.

It’s the WordPress.com Stats Plugin.  I also use Google Analytics, but the WP plugin is just more convenient to check.  So just in case you’re interested, the Google Analytics report looks about the same…

The last post generated a bit of confusion.  People didn’t understand how I could build so much organic traffic without backlinks.

For the record, I never said this site doesn’t have backlinks.  Of course it does.  However, they were earned naturally.  The point is, I haven’t been chasing or manually building backlinks through guest posting, linking schemes, etc.

I have simply been writing content and targeting long-tail (less competitive) keywords.

So I updated my traffic story on my forum, Website Babble, and it was good to see that other members are experiencing similar results.  Here are two replies from the thread…

From Seanguy75

Lisa this is a very cool post. Thanks for sharing your experience with this! Other than making a squidoo page early on that links to our site and literally only having our website address in one signature on one forum related to our niche, we have done no backlink building at all.

We are ranking #1 for our original keyword that I targeted at the beginning and #3 right now for another larger keyword in the niche. We are getting around 40,000-50,000 page views a month right now and hope to keep increasing this!

I have never done a guest post and have focused mainly on content and SEO. The SEO mainly being on page SEO. I tell my girlfriend who is actually my partner on the website now all the time about the things you recommend and how you do things. Cool post here and very encouraging for us!

It is funny, I was not expecting us to hit the top of our keyword as soon as we did so I have focused most of my efforts and research into content and basically how to get where we are now.

I told my girlfriend, wow I guess it is time for me to start researching and learning all about monetization now! We went from getting 10-40 visitors a day to 500-800 a day within a few weeks and have stayed in the upper amounts ever since. It has just been hitting me that we have enough traffic to really start doing something here now. LOL

Anyhow, most of this was done without any backlink chasing at all. I just never really got around to that. Once it became about content, it just has been about that ever since. Thank you for your ethics, your inspiration, your attentiveness to questions even though you must have a thousand or more a day and for this post!  Can’t wait to hit 100k!

From emvy548

I do have a similar experience as seanguy75.

I have a website in a hard-fought photography related niche. I posted a lot of good content based on my experience as a freelance photographer (one of my hobbies), and also some research done on the web. I did not build any backlinks for this site and let it sit – pretty much forgot about it while I got tied into various other assignments.

A few months later I noticed that my website was ranking in the top 5 results for several two-word keyword phrases with two of them being in the top three. It is a simple site with pure content and no monetization – not even Adsense on this one.

I am planning to add more content and monetize it though, hoping at the same time that its stays afloat at the top!

You can join this conversation on Website Babble here.

Let me make one thing clear.  Building a business that relies solely on SEO is a dangerous game.  That is not the point of this post.

If you’ve been following me long enough, you know that my business is not SEO dependent.  This is just an experiment.  I just want to show that yes, in 2013 it is still possible to build decent traffic without chasing backlinks.

Of course, a lot of variables have to come into play (niche choice, competition, the quality of the earned backlinks, etc.) however it is still possible.  Too many people today are still targeting competitive/broad keywords and their sites are not focused enough around a central theme.

And I actually think this site would have even more traffic had I done this experiment before Google started favoring brands in late 2010.  With this experiment specifically, it is quite evident how much brands get a lift in the SERPS.

So ranking for long-tail (less competitive) keywords is where the traffic is coming from (just like Carl’s Disney site).

Having said that, I’m not complaining. Getting 150,000 monthly page views (2300 daily uniques) is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

I really enjoyed reading all your comments on the last post.  Many of you confirmed that you’ve experienced positive traffic results without chasing backlinks as well.

Keep the encouraging results and comments coming!

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