Just When I Thought Google Hated Me
I don’t know about you, but my PR was showing as a 1 forever. Not that it really matters since I’m not really selling anything here, but it was kind of annoying. Why wouldn’t Google satisfy my ego like it does for everyone else? (Actually, it was more like, “I don’t suck that bad.”) The crazy thing is that my blog feed page had been showing up at a PR 3 all along, but that made no sense to me, unless Google was using my Google Analytics traffic to determine which of my pages were important –which is very possible. I get a lot more hits on my feed than my regular pages: probably a combination of having savvy readers and a really ugly pic. :)
Still, I suspected (since my content is so darn good) that if I was not unconsciously breaking some cardinal rules, then Google must be was just toying with me using cached data from different data centers. Since I’ve now instantly jumped from a 1 to a 5 doing hardly anything, I think it was the latter; but there’s no way to be sure –it’s just too much of a black box. Being a little opaque plays to Google advantage since it keeps blackhatters from gaming the system. I like that because it makes search result more relevant. But I’ve determined that Google’s antics are enough to drive anybody crazy if they’re trying to use PageRank as any sort of validation measure. Here at home, I’m still showing up at a 1.
So I wish I’d seen this Future PageRank Tool a little sooner. I don’t know how long my PageRank was limboing in Google purgatory, but my big jump tells me it was a while. The Future PageRank Tool basically queries a whole bunch of Google data centers for you, so it’s like the Google Toolbar, only reliable. Had I used it a few months ago, I may had saved myself some counseling. :)
By the way, for those of you who don’t use the SearchStatus plugin for SEO, it’s basically the Google and Alexa toolbars combined and on steroids. If you’re still wallowing in IE sadness, the SearchStatus plugin is yet another reason to use Firefox (YAR2UFF) . Perhaps I’ll highlight the many merits of SearchStatus in some future post, but for now you’ll just have to take my word for it.
So wanna know if Google loves you after all? Check out Future PageRank. If it turns out that Google really does hate you, then take comfort in the fact that “Future PageRank Tool” is somewhat of a misnomer; it really only sees the present. There’s still hope for you and Google in the future, and even there weren’t, MSN isn’t that bad… Lots of people like butterflies… We call them “lepidopterologists”, or more comonly, “weirdos”.
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Tags: Alexa, Black Hat, Caching, Firefox, Free Tools, Future PageRank Tool, Google, Google Analytics, PageRank, Search Engines, SearchStatus, SEO, Syndication, Tips and Tricks, Uncategorized, Vanity
October 9th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
What’s up with that? My medicalspasonline.com blog just got relegated to a 3. But what does Google know?
October 10th, 2006 at 8:59 am
Google just did a PR update about two weeks ago. That’s when everyone saw the rise or fall in their PR levels. While PR is nice for bragging rights it isn’t really as important as it used to be. Also, did you say your blog was higher ranked than the rest of your site? That makes perfect sense if you consider Google ranks webpages not websites. If your blog gets all the traffic and has all the inbound links its going to be ranked higher than the rest of your site with minimal links.
October 10th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
@ Christer “Also, did you say your blog was higher ranked than the rest of your site?”
No, I said my blog feed (http://jordy.gundy.org/feed/) was showing a higher ranking than my blog’s index page (http://jordy.gundy.org/). That’s weird because the feed should have relatively few links to it –certainly not more than my main page. Thus, a disparity between data centers.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
While PageRank’s significance seems to be getting smaller every year that goes by, the ego boost of a PageRank increase still somehow brightens my day! I take pleasure in the little things. :-)