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You may have noticed this blog is back to a PageRank 6. Back in October 2007 my site was one of the blogs hit with a PageRank penalty because I had paid links. I dropped from a 6 to a 5 and then later when the big sweep happened, down to a 3.

This article sums up my speculation during the event and lists some of the other blogs hit at the time - Possible Explanations for the PageRank Penalty Sweep.

After some thinking I decided, at least on this blog, to add ‘no follow’ to any paid links and succumb to Google’s wishes. I added the no follows, submitted a review request with Google at their Webmaster Tools and then sat down and wrote this - Frustrating Yes - But I Want Google To Be My Friend.

Nothing happened for a month, but I thought Google might need longer so I let it sit. Little did I know that Google simply doesn’t tell you whether you have successfully adhered to their requests or you still need to do more to have the penalty removed and apparently I hadn’t done enough.

Another victim of a PageRank drop was Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home. Wendy was relentlessly monitoring what was going on with Google as she attempted to have her PageRank restored to it’s original status and every now and then she updated me with details on what she found.

A couple of weeks ago she finally found what she was looking for - a blog post about people who had submitted requests to remove the PageRank penalty to no avail. The post itself didn’t have the answers, it was the comment stream after it that presented the solution, or should I say it was Matt Cutts, Google’s blogging rep who provided the answer because he was diligently responding to comments to the post.

Matt went so far as to even personally help some of the bloggers who asked for Google to go look at their site because they were certain they had removed or nofollowed all paid links.

The blog post is here - Matt Cutts, Why Am I Still Being Punished? - and kudos to DazzlinDonna from SEO Scoop for asking the question.

I read the comment stream, determined that I hadn’t been liberal enough with no follow tagging and then went into my blog archives to rectify the situation (I’m just glad I haven’t done many paid reviews, I can’t imagine how much of a job this would be for someone who actively does paid reviews). After I submitted another Google request to have the penalty removed and a week or so later it was done.

I owe Wendy a huge thanks for keeping me up to date with this - cheers Wendy!

If you still have not had your PageRank restored and you are prepared to follow Google’s rules, check out the post above, the answers are there.

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Update: Since they added a new video to this series, you have to click the “view playlist” button in the video player and choose the video with Andy Edmonds presenting StomperNet Scrutinizer to get the video I am referring to.

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Andy Jenkins and his team at StomperNet are at it again, releasing more great free videos, this time under the label of “Going Natural 2.0″.

Here is the current video that reveals a ton of information about how a few simple changes to your navigation structure, your use of whitespace and contrast, will improve your site’s visual appeal and ensure you keep visitors at your site for longer.

The video is 30 minutes long, so set aside some time and have a notepad ready, you will definitely want to run back to your site after this video is done and make some changes to your design.

Your Blog Design Sucks Too

I’ve looked at a lot of blogs and had a lot of people ask me to review their blog. The most common problem I see when looking at blog design is how cluttered and “busy” most blogs are, full of widgets and graphics and buttons and just too much going on. And yes, I’m taking my own advice - my new blog design is definitely cleaner than the current one.

When I tell people to “simplify” their blog it’s not just based my opinion - it’s the cold hard truth about how people interact with websites.

How do I know this is the truth? Because scientific eye-tracking tests confirm it.

Using technology that can track eye movement, advanced marketers like the team at StomperNet are testing how people look at websites, what keeps them interested and what drives them away. It really is eye-opening stuff - no pun intended!

It’s worth watching this video just to see eye-tracking in action and also learn more about the human eye. After this video you will understand why so many site designs deliver information in tight little boxes - it’s because of how the human works!

If you have a high bounce rate at your blog or you sell products from your site using a shopping cart or you just want to know how to better structure certain elements of your site design to encourage people to stay longer and perform certain actions (join a newsletter, click a checkout button, etc), this video is a must watch.

You can watch the larger version of the video by going to www.stompernet.net.

Now I’m going to go back and watch the video before this one about duplicate content.

Yaro Starak
Eye-Tracker

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I’m not entirely sure I want to write this article. I think one of the best ways to reduce the impact of Google’s PageRank is to talk less about it. If you ignore something it loses all power.

However, people still seem to care about PageRank. Webmasters care, bloggers care, search engine optimizers care. Even bloggers who are writing articles telling us not to care about PageRank are somewhat contradicting their own advice by contributing to the conversation. I’m about to do the same.

Given the PageRank changes in the last day or two, in particular the penalties handed out to some sites and blogs that even the best search engine optimizers are dumbfounded attempting to determine an explanation for, I felt I should throw in my two cents about what I think Google is doing.

A Brief History

To put this into context I’ll quickly recount what I’ve watched happen and experienced myself over the past few weeks and over the course of my time caring about PageRank (about five or six years now).

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People who run e-commerce sites - sites that are focused on making sales of a product - have a history of great difficulty when it comes to search engine optimization. We are told to build links to improve search engine rankings, yet why would a person link to a site that is essentially a glorified shopping cart?

One of the most common ways that e-commerce store owners have gone about an SEO campaign is to add a content component to their site, hoping to attract links for the content, which in turn will raise the overall ranking of the entire domain. Unfortunately this tactic tends to impact the ability of the e-commerce site to do what it is meant to do - make sales - because the addition of content creates a “mixed message”, confusing visitors and reducing conversion.

Search engine traffic can be the difference between success and failure for many e-commerce sites, and since it’s free traffic, there isn’t a single store owner out there who wouldn’t want to capture top rankings. Many millionaires are created because of their ability to optimize for product related search terms in Google, Yahoo and MSN, so what is the secret to their success?

In this article I’m going to demonstrate one technique, a fairly extensive technique - a secret weapon - that search engine optimizers use to help one main site dominate rankings for both top level keywords and long tail phrases. This is powerful stuff, so if you own an e-commerce store or any website that you want to rank number one for a specific term, it’s time to pay attention!

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I just can’t seem to get it right about this whole PageRank update thing. First I thought PageRank was updating, then I noticed it was just some sites dropping in PR, then I thought it was updating again when this blog dropped from a 6 to a 5, but now it seems it could have just been a penalty applied to my blog manually.

Penalized For Selling Links?

Based on the conversations going on, some referencing to my blog as an example to prove the point, it appears that Google could be going around and manually penalizing sites by dropping their visible PageRank and possibly penalizing their search results too, as a punishment for selling text links.

I can’t verify any of this of course, but let’s speculate as if it were true for the sake of the discussion.

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