Staska.Net

I am pretty unhappy (to put it mildly) with the results from the last Google Page Rank update. While getting PR3 for Staska.net was a nice thing for a blog that was barely a month old, my other sites did not fare that well.

The thing that really pissed me off, was the reduction of the toolbar pagerank for my main cellphone blog. I’ve got PR5 for it last July and it has been steadily there until April 2007 update.

Since this January, when I resumed my blogging activities, I at least doubled (maybe even tripled) the number of incoming links to this blog. And a lot of the links were from PR7-8 sites like Engadget, Gizmodo or CrunchGear.

So when I saw my PR start to fluctuate on various Google datacenters in the beginning of April, I was pretty sure that I’m getting a bump to PR6 for the cellphone blog. Only to find it brought down to PR4!

WTF?! How come my blog was worth PR5 when it had only half of the links it has today, and is reduced to PR4 when it doubles the link count?!

Oh well, Google giveth and Google taketh away…

I can sit here fuming and trying to think of the reasons of why Google punished me. I already have a couple.

• Paid links. I had only two paid links through Text Link Ads in January. Now I have 12 (10 though TLA and 2 from Text Link Brokers)
• robots.txt. I have restricted Googlebot access to my feed pages in robots.txt, to prevent duplicate content. So now my Google Webmaster Central tells me that there are 385 URLs restricted by robots.txt

But neither of them sound very credible.

The funniest thing is that my Google rankings are better then ever. I think I’m out of the sandbox, I’m starting to rank well for some pretty competitive terms and my Google traffic increased 30-50% in April. I may even start to like big tech show weeks soon.

So, other then pricking my ego balloon and shattering my $100 per TLA link dreams, this PR reduction did not have any marked impact on my online income. Even my Text Link Ads earnings for May did not go down.

I guess the best thing I can do now, is keep posting good content, getting new links, keep learning and be on constant lookout for the new opportunities.

Oh, and hope the next PR update in July will be better!

But I’d still like to hear your ideas of why Google reduces PR. Especially for the sites that did a good job adding new content and collecting backlinks.