For me, revenue is the main metric that matters. I understand why others would focus on a green bar, but for my business model, it makes no sense. I can’t pay the rent with green fairy dust. I can’t pay any bills with it. In fact, everyone I deal with wants green, but it’s cold hard cash they crave. Others make their money because of the PageRank of their websites, so obviously their opinions are skewed towards thinking PageRank is of utmost importance.

A few years ago I realized that PageRank wasn’t something I could control. I am not responsible for it, I can’t adjust it, so I don’t spend my time thinking about it. If I lose some or gain some, I’ll never know, because I’m more concerned with the daily rankings updates that Google does. You notice then when you produce fresh content around the clock. If you make pages every day for Google, you’ll realize there aren’t that many significant updates occurring that really affect your websites.

I’ve seen Google constantly and artificially manipulate PageRank values for years now. I have web pages with hundreds of thousands of “earned links” that sport PageRank 1 or 2. I can find freshly created Blogspots with PR 4s. I would still much rather have the lower PR page that makes me money than the inflated one that doesn’t.

Hopefully everyone out there is happy with the amount of PageRank they got. Because, frankly, there isn’t much that can be done about if they’re not.

Many websites basically nofollow all external links now. Of course “PR hoarders” are nothing new in this world, but it means there really is no such thing anymore as a “freely given editorial link” that constitutes a “vote” for a website. I produce content every day on a number of subjects and am linked to quite often. Unfortunately, almost all of the links are now “nofollowed” even ones where my post is cited as the ‘only source’ for the creation of their story! Ha!

Let’s look at the original post for nofollow from 2005.

We encourage you to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute anywhere that users can add live links by themselves, including within comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. Comment areas receive the most attention, but securing every location where someone can add a link is the way to keep spammers at bay.

Now the definition of nofollow is expanding every day. Remarkably enough, even Google’s new Knoll project will employ nofollow on all external links. This is the same policy that’s now employed by basically all “authority” sites online. They are happy to have people link to them, but they won’t link back out to anyone, regardless of why the link was created in the first place.

Nofollow is now officially being misused by everyone online, and natural linking is largely a thing of the past. And what about comment spam and forum spam? Based on my daily job of removing it, it hasn’t gone anywhere.

Let’s consider the benefits of on-page SEO:

1. It’s a process that you can control completely
2. If you get your on-page SEO right, it will boost your off-page factors

On-page SEO is easy…and fun.

3. On-page SEO can help you take advantage of the Google freshness factor by being first to market

Now, the main drawback to On-page SEO is that it might not be enough in competitive areas. For the truly commercial areas in Google’s search engine you’ll have to rely on other factors more, such as a link building campaign, domain age, and overall link profile.

But for anyone competing for relatively “easy” keywords, on-page optimization will generally be enough. If the pages themselves are good, you’ll attract natural linkage will vastly improve your link profile, resulting in durable results.

It’s worth using on-page as one of your principle methods of SEO, especially for new websites.

# Frequency capping, which prevents users from repeatedly seeing the same ads on your pages.
# Improved attribution, to help advertisers identify the best performing sites in the network based on post-impression activity.
# Improved ads quality, as we’re able to improve ad performance within the Google content network.

For sure the frequency capping will provide a boost. People who don’t click on an ad aren’t more likely to click it because of repetition. Trying a new ad with a fresh approach is always an excellent option.

As to the “improved attrition”, I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder. But basing website compensation on performance never seems like a bad idea to me.

As to improvements in quality, I assume this means that poorly performing ads will be dumped altogether in lieu of ads that perform better.

All in all, these new changes should help push more profits to our websites.

But frankly, Google’s success is for such a simple reason that people sometimes miss it. Google is so successful because their search engine generally finds the “right” results. Plus they do it often enough that people have become totally used to the system. Further, Google has tied all of us into so many sophisticated programs that their volume of traffic is just enormous. Could someone beat them? Theoretically, but they’ll have their work cut out for them. Besides, if Google realizes another company is making progress they’ll probably buy them out quickly.

Really, anyone who plans on beating Google has to do it by providing better results. And that’s going to be tough to do, especially when you consider that Google almost always:

1. Provides very fresh results
2. Does have most of the web indexed
3. Provides generally relevant SERPs

The real key to their success is that they do this billions of times a month and rarely “choke” on a single search. They’re the undisputed leaders in scale and sophistication and any start-up is a long way away from catching up.

1. There’s already a lot of content on the internet. Duplicate content won’t excite anyone, whereas original content would stand a chance to succeed.
2. Building a readership and attracting visitors is tougher to do with a derivative website
3. Users who get a sense of “Deja Vu” won’t stick around for long.

An example is the number of cloned web directory sites you’ll see on the internet. Even though they use different “skins”, they all have the same basic category structure. If you’ve ever submitted to even five of these in a row, you’ll quickly bog down in the sheer monotony in your task.

Sure, it takes longer to be original, but it’s worth it. Of course you don’t have to be 100% original. Everyone is influenced by websites that are popular, so it’s understandable you’ll have some of the same flavor as others. But the key is offering something totally unique that gives your site a personality. If you do that, the issue of branding will be that much easier.

It looks like Alexa must have finally figured out how to get rid of bots that were pretending to be human. With the change, many former “premium” websites have hit the skids.

Sure, Alexa rankings in general are junk. But in the absence of anything better, they tend to set the market for promotions on many websites. I’m sure many webmasters were making money due to their inflated numbers. Now the numbers continue to drop.

Google doesn’t “dance” in the way it did a few years ago, but there are periods of seismic shifting that happen every now and again. This seems to be one of those times. I suspect that Google is using more and more data from their personalization arsenal to help rank sites. I can’t prove it, but it would explain some of the types of changes I’m seeing.

It seems I’m in sync with Google these days, at least for the moment. I’ve been emphasizing content production all else for quite some time, and it seems to be paying off. Google is a fast system these days. It’s not uncommon for me to have traffic at my blogs within 5 seconds of publishing! That’s the type of response time I love.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing a PR update soon, as well. It seems a spike in traffic tends to precede a PR update, so we’ll see if that theory holds true.

All in all, this latest Google update seems like it’s been kind to me. How about you?

Frankly, I’d say Google is doing a nice job these days. They seem to have placed a great emphasis on fresh content, and that’s useful for most surfers, IMHO. Comprehensiveness and freshness are the main reason Google always seems to retain their crown as Search King.

If you start to get accolades about your blog posting, don’t let it go to your head. It certainly is a good sign, but you have to maintain the same high quality or you can expect to fall out of people’s minds quite fast.

Yes, you’re only as good as your last post and you just don’t have time to sit around admiring what you’ve done. You still need more visitors, no matter how well your last one went. So now you’ll have to focus on your next post, or the one you’re doing right now. And when that one’s over, you have to go on to the next. This is the nature of the type of traffic generation that’s quite successful in the current blogosphere. Bloggers who update often tend to be rewarded for their persistence and consistent efforts.

Blogging almost always comes down to a debate between quantity and quality of posts. In reality, the bloggers who tend to reap the most rewards post often and post high quality posts. They keep their eyes on the prize and put their best feet forward every day.

If we follow the same plan, we’ll end up right along them in the pantheon of the greats. Or, at the very least, we’ll generate more traffic to our websites, which is the ultimate goal anyways.

The numbers predicted for online advertising are huge.

The global advertising market grew to just over US$600 billion in 2007, according to The Kelsey Group, the leading provider of research, data and strategic analysis on directional and interactive local media. The firm expects global ad revenues to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.7 percent and reach US$707 billion in 2012, propelled in large part by considerable growth in the interactive segment.

According to “The Kelsey Group’s Annual Forecast (2007-2012): Outlook for Directional and Interactive Advertising,” interactive advertising revenues will increase significantly from US$45 billion in 2007 to US$147 billion globally in 2012, representing a 23.4 percent CAGR.

This is truly great news for anyone who’s making money from online advertising. In essence, if you just track industry growth as an average player, you can reasonably expect growth of 23.4% annually. Of course this might not be true if your partners take a bigger cut of revenue, but with increased competition in the online ad arena, I’m not so sure they will.

If you can excel, then your chances for much bigger money grow even better. Traditional media’s loss appears to be new media’s gain. The continued downturn for offline companies represents an excellent growth opportunity for people with content websites, as long as you can provide a decent stream of eyeballs to advertisers. Well trafficked deep content websites are looking at their revenue doubling in the next 27 months alone, all things considered.

These are happy days indeed.