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The Google Trap
Nov 5 2007

Since the primary goal of this blog is not monetization, I was intrigued by many other bloggers outcries at the recent changes made by Google that drastically affected their Google page ranks.  Since many bloggers are trying to make a decent income from their blog, this action by Google apparently really hurts them with regards to interest by other advertisers, impressions, visits to their sites, search optimization, etc.

Honestly, I don’t even know what the page rank of my blog is.  (UPDATE: I now know my blog has a PageRank of 5) Someone once told me that you can get a tool bar add on from Google that tells you the page rank of every page you are on, but since I’m not really into page rank yet, I haven’t devoted the time to finding that little toolbar.  I’m sure I’ll get around to it some day and may be the relevant thoughts on the subject that I found below will engender a new thought about the plight in the future.  I do use Google Analytics so maybe I’ll find my rank noted in my account.

One thing I did notice was that when I removed the widget for Text Link Ads from my side bar, traffic to my blog almost doubled.  Now I don’t know if there is any direct correlation or not because there are so many variables that affect the amount of visitors, but it may be a part of it.  I wasn’t getting any revenue from them anyway so it was not a hard decision to make.  I wonder if I reactivate my Google AdSense account if I’ll get even more visitors…

Here are some great articles on the Google Monopoly Trap topic:

Composing the perfect letter of surrender on Search Engine Guide.  A hilarious conversation between Jennifer Laycock and Robert Clough.

Frustrating Yes – But I Want Google To Be My Friend by Yaro Starak at Entrepreneur’s Journey.

4 Search Engine Optimization Rules That Were Supposed to Actually Matter by Wendy Piersall at eMoms at Home.

Don’t let it bring you down! by Pearl at Interesting Observations.

Dear Google, I’m the Relationship Blogger by Liz Strauss at Successful Blog.

Author: | Filed under: blogging | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments »

2 Comments on “The Google Trap”

  1. 1 Wendy Piersall said at 2:21 PM on November 5th, 2007:

    I really doubt that removing the TLA script from your site had anything to do with it. I can’t think of any possible way that it would make a difference, as even though Google dropped page rank for some people, nobody reported a loss of traffic from it.

    Sometimes it’s just coincidence. 🙂 But if you have more ‘evidence’ I’d be really curious to hear about it!

  2. 2 Aruni said at 2:58 PM on November 5th, 2007:

    Thanks Wendy. I’ll keep watching to see if any other out of the ordinary traffic changes occur. Most likely the increase in traffic is unrelated to removing the Text Link widget (espcially since I had no visible links from them) but I did find it interesting nonetheless. 🙂 Text Link Ads didn’t work for me so it’s hard to say.

    I wonder if any of the other major bloggers who have been blogging much longer than I have did remove TLA and saw a change in traffic.