It seems to be almost like a morning after Hiroshima’s explosion, today that most PR’s collapsed, some even from PR7 to PR4 (which I’d assume it rather tragic). Everyone is talking about it and most webmasters either don’t see an update or see it with tears in their eyes.

What happened? Why those who never sold text links based on PR are now penalized? It looks as if Google just wanna level everyone ad start building the new Rank Concept anew. Sadly I see that our biggest competitor who owns a PR7 domain and openly sells dozens of links on his site, only because it’s a PR7 site, was not panelized.

Justice for all.

Shoemoney, my idol, speaks about Google’s game with paid links and their “magic” algorithm, that seems to game away to MSN and Yahoo search. Everyone panics, PageRanks are dropping. Ranking collapse, total Anarchy in the webmaster’s world; links sales froze, domains sales froze, life stopped… I know it looks like this, with johnchow.com dropping to PR5, with Andy Beard dropping to PR4, with statcounter.com dropping to PR8 (crap, wish I “dropped” to PR8!) and plenty of other terrifying examples… Still, life goes on and watch this video, which will help you realize there is certainly life without Google!

The rumors about Google dropping the whole PageRank thing are spreading around, almost every blog has managed to cover the panic by now and spread some more fear. Will Google REALLY do away with PR? We do not know, and cannot know, but just set your mind at ease… have you paid x,xxx $ just for a PR6 site, only because it’s PR6? You didn’t, right? But many, many, MANY, did! Yes, loads of webmasters paid crazy money for domains alone only because they were PR6 or higher. If you didn’t, why should you worry? They will probably come up with some alternative altagorism, maybe something more SE-based, rather than links-value-based… or maybe something like Alexa, that would measure the hits per page, or… I don’t know, but if you ask me, Google PR update WILL take place sooner or later, and PR will stick around for some time.

A several days ago, Matt Cutts himself said on Digital point that Page Rank is unlikely to be updated in the next 2 weeks. This means toolbar won’t export this week for sure and all those of us who are impatiently waiting for it, would have to wait some more. And yes, it’s REAL Matt, even Shawn, owner of Digital point, confirmed his identity. So… I guess we can say — good things come to those who wait. Damn.

Seems like this quarter’s update is taking way too long, some of my friends report having their PR dropped, others are happy with a small lift in ranking (I noticed that most PR0’s got a green promotion this update so far). I also noticed over a week ago that quite a few inner pages of Lorelei Web forum got PR3 after being PR1 or had no ranking at all.

Basically, Google PageRank is just a number, it’s no traffic, no Adsense clicks, no guarantee of anything, except for maybe a far better revenue, and guaranteed ads space sales. I am still curious about the final results for this blog as well as for my other sites, after all, Nowg.Net has over 8000 backlinks. Let’s hope by the end of the week (11th, 12th of August) we will have final results and need not refresh digpagerank.com every hour.

The (maybe) sad thing is, blogger normally makes more money than owner of a regular HTML site. Sponsored reviews, php-compatible ads-space (such as Text Link ads) and many other options are targeted and optimized for bloggers, which is why bloggers are always richer.

Still and all, visitors, as I already said, are a lazy nation. If every visitor would result in at least one profitable action (click on Adsense, buy something through our referral, etc) — bloggers could have been way richer. For instance, this blog has a good traffic yet receives only a few clicks a day, as a result, Adsense makes only 0.5% of my overall revenue for Now G Net. The picture could have been different if each of the 500+ visitors a day would have clicked, right? But they don’t, because I try to maintain a clean look of the blog, I am rather put off by the blogs where adverts dominate the design (let alone — content) and in my efforts to avoid it, Adsense is reduced to utmost minimum here.

Those of you who wish to see Adsense making a significant progress in your revenue percentage, I’d recommend:

1. Clean up the rest of the adverts which only gather cyber dust. Remove everything that can potentially drive visitors attention away from PPC Adverts (such as useless illustrations, blinking images, etc).
2. Optimize your ads placement for best results.
3. Make sure your adverts do not look like adverts. People don’t like “clicking on ads”, because… they know these are ads. Your Click-Through-Rate would be significantly better if readers will think they click on links YOU offer them.

My idea is, you have to reach the point when every visitor on your site results in some action, be it leaving a comment, subscribing to your feed, signing up though your affiliate URL, clicking on ads or even (as prosaic as it sounds) — read more than one post on your blog. When you reach this level, when each of your visitors brings some benefit, you will have a profitable and busy blog, with high traffic and breeding ground for sponsors.

Very slowly but more and more people are confirming their sites have some movement on a few data centers, I did not notice anything on any of my websites yet but seems like the very first sparkle happened on the 18th earlier this month. Still a long way to go until the update will start it’s full attack, but you can start checking, praying and hoping now already. Start checking your site’s ranking using the “72.14.20x  ip” data centers (DC nr. 1) at digpagerank.com, where as you can see, we still have no evidence of the update. Oh.

There is so much speculation around the upcoming PR update, folks on Digital Point Forum has been talking ceaselessly about it ever since the last update back in spring and everyone seems to be over-excited about the upcoming changes. Me too, actually. Having said that, as if PR update only brings good news, sometimes it results in a PR drop, which makes us wait even more ardently for the next one. I am following the rank of NowG.net closely, and recommend you to use a tool such as Dig PageRank or Live PageRank, which shows ranks at each Data Center separably, so you can see right away if any movement took place.

Fingers crossed, changes are on the horizon. Rumors say, the update will begin either in the end of July or beginning of August, so not much left to wait!