BellaOnline Forums Career Business Coach Google shake-up?

I suggest the google toolbar. I use it more than any other add-on toolbar.

You can check your gmail, rss feeds, PR - of course, and even save bookmarks that you can access from ANY internet-connected computer.

It's a great tool.

Thanks BellaMeg. I'll look into that one.

When I used to have a page rank tool it was helpful for knowing if I wanted to link to the site from one of my pages or not.

I don't really use PR when deciding whether or not to link to a page.

If I'm writing about it - I'll link to it. If it's relevant to what I'm writing about - I'll link to it.

And it's got to be a quality site, too.


In my opinion the whole point of linking to a site is to promote something worthwhile. If it's unethical or lame, no matter how much PR or reciprocal PR potential - I wont link.

It helps with your own google rankings tho if you link to sites with a PR of 3 or, preferably higher. When I first started my site, I only linked to sites that were ranked about 4 or 5 and I think it helped me get my own site up in the rankings-or it was one of the things I did, anyway.

To me, at that time, it was about getting my own site seen and read. Since then, I have linked to any site that I saw as having content I wanted to promote or info that added some dimension to my own site.

Internet traffic is growing every day. In general there is a *slight* drop in June-July-August but for most people the internet is a cyclical world. My Champagne pages spike in December. My sangria pages spike in the summer. You can't expect any topic to be a steady level all year around. That wouldn't make sense You have to watch what people search on and pay attention to that. Articles on skiing will do well in the winter. They'll do less well in the summer.

But since more and more people exist in the world every year, and more and more people are on the internet every month, traffic *should* always be growing. By knowing your cycles, and ensuring you have content in every "section" of the year, when one topic is dropping off you should have another topic naturally growing.

I definitely do NOT recommend linking to sites. You get far more traffic for your site if you have great content. If you start linking you have great danger of being tagged as a link farm. I've never seen any benefit at all in linking or receiving links.

Usually I do pretty well most of the year. I have weightloss pages that do great from January to about May, then I have wellness travel pages for the summer and wellness gift pages for the fall for Christmas shopping.

I think what happened is that one certain page just disappeared from the rankings and then the rest have tapered off for summer.

I've decided to just let that site go along for a while without my doing anything and I'm focusing on other projects, like my blog. If I'm going to have multiple streams of income, at some point I need to let the website become a passive income anyway or there won't be time to have the "mulitple" part.

I have 2 friends with websites that are fairly successful. They rarely add new content anymore or even look at their stats and things seem to go along fine.

Sharing some google gossip from the net that might be related?

Apparently other site users such as squidoo users have been badly affected by something called a 'google slapback!'

- where some of their top 100 pages have dropped like a stone down to where they started. I am amazed how philosophic about it they are! Most are just going to start again from the beginning building traffic!

No-one seems to know why this has happened but I wonder if they are penalising sites with duplicate or thin content?

The top 100 seem unaffected but are very full and comprehensive - if interested in comparing, I have written there myself on London Budget Travel:

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From what I understand, search engines HATE duplicate content! You have to be really careful about that.

I'd heard too that there was something that happened with squidoo too.

What do you think it means when page rank rises even though views stay static?

My London web-page is rising nicley (to my surprise) yet without many people seeing it yet?

Just wondering if I'll be penalised too, or not. My content is genuine and recent however - maybe that's why?

(PS Off-topic - we bought some exciting supersize me strawberry plants today! Can't wait to see them ripen! Any health benefits? Might pop over to the gardening forum too. Will post separately about them!)

The green PageRank symbol in google's toolbar is based on data that is about 3 months old. It's not going to change daily, or overnight.

And overall, is a reflection of the quality of your site, it's usefulness, rather than the traffic.

You can easily get a full rundown on what kind of traffic you're getting, where they are coming from and how long they stay on your site, by joining Google Analytics. It's free, and the data is quite enlightening!