Page Rank Update

Google pushed out the page rank update the other day. Page rank is such a funny concept. It doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in how high a site shows up in the search results. I’m not sure what Google really gets out of having the page rank be public.

One area where it does play a very large factor is with advertising. Sites are willing to pay more for links from sites with higher page rank. It is a pricing factor in both Text Link Ads and Review Me and I’m sure plenty of others.

I find that all very amusing since Google really doesn’t like buying text link ads for improving page rank. They claim to be fine with buying text link ads for improving traffic or branding for a site but, let’s face it, the three are all blended so tightly into one that Google really just hates text link ads. They have trouble figuring out what to do with them in their algorithms.

So, back to the update. What happened in my little web empire?

Be A Good Dad dropped from 5 to 4. I got a little lazy with the site over the last couple months so I wasn’t really surprised by this but I still think I was hosed.

Kalbzayn’s World stayed at PR 4. This is my oldest site by almost a year. It doesn’t get linked to much anymore but it has had a couple pretty good links and it does seem that age helps with PR.

Talk Hawkeyes rose from 3 to 4. I did a little flurry of posting during the football bowl season and then another flurry during the NCAA tournament but the rest of the time this site was horribly neglected. I have no idea why that site has a PR anywhere near the previous two.

Wallet Advice is my first real attempt to create a site entirely in the hopes of making a couple bucks off of it. It isn’t going well since this site is almost always neglected. It did manage to rise from PR 0 to PR 2 but I think that is entirely just from linking to it from my other blogs.

Webby Thoughts. That’s where you are right now. It is now a PR 4. I believe it was PR 3 before the update. I’ve also been neglecting this site pretty badly but it did manage to get a couple of good for PR links.

Nut Has A Squirrel is my newest site. I just started it last month so it is still PR 0. I started doodling little single panel comics in my notebook recently and also started exploring and finding new-to-me webcomics. So, I decided to start one of my own as a neat little hobby. I’ve always wanted to sit down and practice learning how to draw and figured this would be a good way to force me to do it. It is great fun but I still am trying to decide whether to draw on paper and scan them or just create them entirely on the computer. This site is definitely for fun with no expectation of ever making money. It is also my first site not hosted on GoDaddy.

So what do I do with all of this now? Who knows? PR really isn’t one of those things that I think about that much. I have no idea why Be A Good Dad would rank dramatically higher than the other three PR 4 blogs.

None of my new PR 4 sites have been invited into Text Link Ads yet (I submitted them a while back and Text Link Ads rechecks all sites on the waiting list every month).

The drop in Be A Good Dad was a bit of a kick in the pants to get me motivated to start paying more attention to all of the sites so maybe we’ll have good news when the next update happens. I’d much prefer for the extra work I’m planning to turn into more traffic though.