SEO Blog - Asia SEO Blog

Google has come up with their last page rank update of the year 2008 today! Unlike their previous PR updates, this time around Google has been more or less soft on most domain main (or home) pages as many of them retained or even improved their ranks. Hence the PR update this time has been a good New Year gift for many a blogger.

Google PR update is really something that most bloggers and webmasters look forward to and dread about. PR essentially means money and visibility for bloggers (Perhaps it means nothing for the common - today when I searched the All-Acronyms site for the short-form PR, I was surprised to learn that it didn’t exist there amongst 344 possible definitions for PR. I, in fact, submitted it there immediately). Anyway, as for D$, there was no change in the homepage PR, though I was expecting a PR4 this time. But as I maintained earlier, one has to dig into more details than just the home page PR.

Reading beyond the homepage PR…

As I just mentioned, a Google PR update is much much more than the number allotted for your homepage. It also mean the mass update done on your content and the way your posts and pages are indexed and recognized. Though I was disappointed that my homepage PR did not increase to 4, I am happy about the following internal outcome.

• One third of my posts received a page rank - varying from PR 0 to 3
• Unique and quality content was rewarded very high - e.g. My article on Microsoft Oxite received PR3 and many other unique posts received PR2
• Almost all my posts were indexed by Google
• My search visits % has been steadily increasing, of late

Lessons learned & Action plan

The following are the lessons learned and I have drawn an action plan to make things even better in the future:

• If you keep producing quality content, it doesn’t take more than a few days before it gets indexed and rewarded
• Several (more than 50%) of my posts may need a little more backlink building and SEO optimization to make them visible in Google’s eyes. Sometimes, the content may be unique but you have to convince Google. I have actually shortlisted more than 30 posts that I will be editing soon for better SEO and also use as comment targets on no-nofollow blogs. Basically a high PR on homepage and not many pages with good internal PRs don’t make any sense
• If you are in the good books of Google, you can go places (Remember my tip on backlinking to Google. There are a couple more tips as well which I shall publish soon)
• Google is not hostile towards other brands like Microsoft, WordPress or Bidvertiser as articles on those topics were not ignored but actually got good PR based on the content quality
• Backlinks (from related content) play a major role in getting better PRs. Some pages that had good number of backlinks from unrelated content did not get even PR0
• You need to worry about your no-nofollow outbound links. I took out 3-4 links (including blogroll ones) that were not good for this blog

Over to you…

Please let me know how this PR update has been for your blog? Though, I verified that most of my regular commenters are not suffered this time (and actually got better PRs in some cases), please take a moment to analyze your internal pages’ PRs and comment here on the same.

Happy Blogging!