This is not a useful post at all, but I’m trying to take advantage of heavy searches for the above term. I’ve also got a question for you guys, end of this post. :)

The craze started yesterday and that can only mean one thing in the webmaster world – a Google Pagerank update.

What is Google Pagerank? Well, it’s basically a number showing how ‘authoritative’ your website is – which is judged by the amount of backlinks to it. The scale is from 1-10, with 10 being the highest (Google’s homepage is a ten). The higher your PR, the more valuable your blog is and the more money you can make.

I had a few websites do decently enough – a couple PR5, one PR6, these are my niche websites. As for the social ones, this blog was bumped to a PR4, while BP’s forum went up to PR3 and the homepage went up to PR2.

It’s a complicated process so don’t try and understand how it works, but here’s a few tips to improve your PR.

1. Kill outgoing links. Although you should have some, the less, the better. I recently turned off dofollow comments for this blog – too late to have any real effect on this PR update, but we’ll see how it works next time around.

If you have dofollow enabled, each comment counts as an outgoing link, some to pretty shady websites (spammers that get through) and some with unrelated anchor text. For example, this blog has around 5,500 comments – with dofollow enabled, each of those counted as an outgoing link!

You can also try and use a Wordpress plugin like Post Teaser to shorten your posts and reduce the amount of outgoing links on your frontpage.

2. If you’re going to be a link whore, do it privately. I stopped selling text links on this blog as it doesn’t bring in much for the sidebar space. Don’t flaunt the fact that you’re selling links or using something like Pay Per Post – if you are, keep quiet about it. :)

3. Get inbound links – focus on quality, not quantity. This chart shows what kind of links you need; as you can see, you only need 3 PR4 links to get your blog to PR3, however you need 555 PR1 links to get the same result. An easy way to get those kinds of links is by using dofollow blog comments, high quality directory submissions and of course the top commentators list (*coughs*).

What results did you see this update?

Also, the question…

I’m thinking of adding a forum to this blog – nothing major, but something like using a Wordpress plugin (XDForum) or bbPress (I’ve heard it’s decent…). The reason for this is that sometimes comments on here turn into carnage (which is killer, really) – you guys are kick ass, sometimes too much so. I love the fact that this blog gets an average of near 20 comments per post, but I can’t answer 20 questions per post usually. So what I’m thinking is a simple forum where people can ask questions and answer them; I’ll be on there too and all questions will be answered within a week.

Cost for this will be $497 $297 $97 free. Only for readers of this blog, of course. :razz:

Let me know what you think. :)

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