The Honest Way

Now to be honest, I don’t know what to make of this.

No sooner do we learn about the probable threat of the loss of PR to blogs sporting the Do-Follow plug-in, I now find even more sinister evidence when logging in to my Squidoo account in order to update my lenses. First a bit of background…

About six weeks or so ago, I was delighted to find that some of my Squidoo lenses had been adorned with some page rank, several of them achieving PR3, for which I was very happy and grateful. Some of those lenses have had a lot of work done on them by yours truly and it took a lot of writing, I can tell you! I felt they deserved the accolade and was very proud of them.
So honestly, imagine my horror as I log in and view the state of my well performing lenses.

They’ve all, with the exception of two, been reduced to No Rank - not even a PR0! The Honest Way Lens managed to retain it’s PR2 while one of the others promoting My One Stop was slapped down from a PR3 to a PR1. All the rest - slapped down to the ground.

Why?

That is an honest question I have no honest answer for. They are not blogs, so cannot contain paid reviews, as the sites that promote paid reviews only accept blogs! They are certainly not selling links in any way, shape or form. They don’t accept comments with followed links, so that idea can honestly be ruled out too!

So what have these honest, information and relevant knowledge packed pages been slapped for?

One can only speculate this awful possibility:

That those lenses do provide one-way links to my own websites.

Could Google honestly be going so far as to be trying to stop people from working hard on their various web projects and rewarding their hard work by linking their own sites together?

Why in all honesty would they do that?

It’s not gaming the system to link your own sites together for heaven’s sake. Or maybe they think it is? Who can possibly know what goes on behind those closed boardroom doors in Silicon Valley?

This could be the start of a chilling campaign to stop all inter-site linking as a means of climbing up the SERPs ladder. Maybe their eventual plan is to instead give the top SERPs pages only to those sites big enough and rich enough to buy their way up there. Surely not - they honestly wouldn’t go that far, would they?

Maybe this is an isolated incident and it’s only my lenses that have been affected so far. Although I somehow doubt it. I posted this question in CYN forum earlier this afternoon, so I’ll look back in there later this evening to see if anyone’s lenses have suffered similar fates.

In the meantime, you all had better be careful who’s links you have in your blogrolls…

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Here’s some more honest information that may or may not interest you: I got wind of this from a post in Grizzly’s blog How to Make Money Online for Beginners.

Following the crackdown on link selling and paid review writing blogs by Google, it appears they are not intent on stopping there with their single-minded all-out assault on the acquisition of links by any means other than the natural way.

By that I mean if you think a website is really helpful to you and contains lots of relevant information to your search, it would be natural for you to provide a link to it on your own site so that others could find it and make use of it too. That’s a naturally given link to a good site.

The opposite is giving a link to another site whether it’s good or just a page full of crappy ads just so that you can either obtain a reciprocal link, or get paid in some way for providing the link. This is what Google are quite rightly trying to stamp out so that the sites at the top of its list are relevant to the search term entered.

No arguments there.

But it is coming at a terrible price for small blog owners who are trying to raise the profile of their own blogs and make a few bob in the process. The argument has been raging for over a month now and there’s not a lot of point in adding any more fuel to the fire here.

What I’ve since learned has dampened the blogging spirit just a little more - that Google may well increase their slapping activities to include blogs that use the do-follow plug-in.

That would make sense as their primary goal is to stamp out ANY form of link acquisition that is not naturally generated and this would include obtaining back-links for posting comments in other people’s blogs that allow it.

For that reason, this blog has deactivated the do-follow plug-in until this matter is clarified.

It has been noted that Blogger (the free blogging host that is owned by Google) has removed the URL box from all it’s blogs comment boxes, so you are no longer able to enter your URL when posting a comment to a Blogger blog. That effectively sends out the message that Google will not tolerate anyone even giving away free links.

Where will it stop?

How will anyone be able to obtain links to their sites if no-one is allowed to give them without fear of losing their own page rank?

Will anyone who even links to one of his OWN sites be penalized if he doesn’t use nofollow?

Does that just mean that only the very top sites will ever get to the top of the search engine results pages because everyone else links to them?

Ok, it hasn’t come to that (yet) and let us hope it never does… but one thing still amazes me about the whole slapping thing.

How come the very recipients of these paid links still have their infernal page rank?

And one more thing to ponder.

PayPerPost are the paid review site most targeted by Google as it hammers it’s member bloggers blog’s page ranks down to zero. It must be hard work sifting through all those 100,000 or so blogs to find the ones with links that have earned their owner’s a few dollars.

You’d think they’d go after the easiest site of them all to find in order to slap their page rank down to zero to make an example, but they have not and this particular site’s page rank is still PR5.

Who am I talking about?

PayPerPost themselves!

Go figure!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Here is a little thought provoking post for anyone wanting to use a simple tool to produce an extra feather to their internet marketing cap!

Squidoo is very easy to use abd that’s a fact! To creat a new lens taks a few minutes and then all that you need to do to have your own little extra piece of the internet is to write some original content on your chosen niche and hit the publish button!

Of course, it will need regular looking after if you want it to grow into a truly beneficial addition to your online empire, but it’s worth a little effort every few days to add something to your lens to get it ranking highly within Squidoo’s own system.

Eventually, you’ll see the rewards.

I’ve personally seen some of my lenses rewarded with a PR3 in the recent Google page rank shake-up which means they are even more valuable to me now as one-way link providers to my websites and blogs as well as traffic generators to the same. All for little effort and some writing.

If you haven’t already explored this useful extra business option, don’t you think you should?

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

The author of The Honest Way, as you may already know is a lensmaster over at Squidoo and has created a number of lenses on many different topics over a period of several months.

In the recent page rank shake-up by Google some of the older lenses were awarded with some page rank ranging from 1 to 3. The Honest Way lens was initially awarded a PR3 but that was strangely cut to a PR2 after a few days. A similar thing happened to my Alternative Cures lens that seems to have been cut from a PR3 to a PR0.

Now none of my lenses sell text links in any way, shape or form and this seems to be the main reason why Google has slapped down many high ranking blogs and websites. The only reason I can see for the turnabout with those two lenses (all the others remained untouched) was that they did contain some duplicate content in the form of short excerpts of articles that are published on my corresponding websites.

I have since removed or re-hashed these excerpts, so this may be a timely warning to anyone who has any duplicate content on their sites that Google may well be watching for this and could penalize sites in the next PR shake up.

So simply don’t publish any duplicate content on your site!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way