The past two days have been rife with bloggers pouring out their woes about the stunning and unexpected Google Page Rank adjustments. Funny thing is that for the most part this wailing and gnashing of teeth is not so much being heard by those effected, but other bloggers who are picking the story up. So, as you can see I too have decided to stir the pot a bit and see what emerges from the murk. Except I’m going to try and paint a more realistic and far rosier picture than has come out in general so far.

Google is NOT the internet

Here’s a fact to hang your hat on. If Google went away the internet would still be there. Our blogs and websites would still be there. We’d still be getting traffic (or not). Most people I talk to are getting 2-5% of their traffic from Google. I said 2-5%, not 20 to 50%. There are exceptions, but in general when you really analyze how much traffic Google drives to the average site it is pitiful.

Instead of worrying about where you rank with Google both in terms of keyword searches and in terms of Pagerank give much more consideration to driving traffic to your site via alternative methods. Again Google is NOT the internet. They’re a big player for certain, but their existence or non-existence has no bearing on you or your site unless you allow it to.

Pagerank is cyclic

We often hear both sides of the globing warming issue talking about the cyclic nature of weather and climate. No one seems to agree about the weather, but I think we can all agree about Google Page rank. It might be up, it might be down. If you rely on Google’s whims to determine the fate of your site you are Screwed! With a capital S.

One day at one point you had a page rank of zero, and you either put a concerted focused effort into getting a higher page rank, or you simply worked on your site and built value for your readers and potential future advertisers. Then one day big, bad Google came along and gave you the internet version of a thumbs up and slapped a nice little page rank number on your site. You were happy. You started pointing out this magical number every chance you got.

In fact you started to build your advertising reputation around this number. And one day big, bad Google came around again and took a little bit of the number away. So you worked even harder to bring it up and one day Google saw this and rewarded you with a higher than ever page rank. In fact this goes on and on and on and on but one day Google doesn’t just lower your page rank they almost annihilate it compared to what it once was. And you get bent out of shape loosing focus on the fact that it is all cyclic in nature.

Advertising in a post-pagerank world

One of the biggest problems coming to light is how many websites and blogs have depended on pagerank as a marketing tool. Don’t blame Google or anyone else for this. It was caused strictly by site owners who instead of getting their hands dirty working at getting advertisers to their sites decided to use an obvious and very convient shortcut which allowed them to simply float an arbitrary number out to potential advertising clients. They didn’t need to build relationships with those clients they simply needed to show off their pagerank. The higher it was the more they could charge for advertising. Those are the people who are worst hit by having the pagerank devalued. The people who used pagerank in place of building relationships.

So what’s a blog or website owner to do? First of all don’t panic, or get worked up about it. You can either do what John Chow does and keep on keepin’ on because he sees it for what it really is, or you can do what so many others are doing and start spouting off about doom and gloom and how much people should be concerned with pagerank. If the latter is your choice stop reading now because you’ll only be wasting your time. If however you want to keep going then I have some suggestions to help you out.

• Lose the text link brokers such as TLA except to get affiliates
• Market your text links (and other forms of advertising) directly and cut out the middle-man
• Sit down and spend a few hours really determining the value of your traffic
• Use the value of your traffic as a basic pricing guideline
• Start competing against sites similar to yours and not against your own pagerank
• Remove all mentions of pagerank from your site, especially pages designed to promote advertising space

Determining how much you should pay to advertise

This seems like a no brainer to me. Determine how much to pay based on the potential to get traffic to your site. It is as simple as that. I don’t need a page rank number to know that advertising on a site like John Chow, or Problogger is well worth the investment. I know for a fact I will get traffic from those sites even if they had pageranks of -50.

To simplify don’t concern yourself with a sites pagerank as it will have very little impact on the traffic generated by that site. Instead concern youself with these things.

• Finding high traffic sites within your niche to advertise on
• Building relationships with the owners of those sites
• Designing quality ads that will attract the attention of more than just your mother and grandmother
• Build relationships with people who click on your ads as soon as they reach your site not after they’ve been around for a while

How important is your pagerank to you? Is pagerank a fair indication of a sites value? Do you advertise strictly based on a sites pagerank?