It seems that Google updated the Page Rank of websites and blogs the past few days. Guess what? ReapMoneyOnline has lost all the little green pixels. We spent some time with the Google group on page ranking to find out if RMO has been penalized since we always thought that a blog with unique content and more than 2,000 inbound links will warrant at least a PR1. Hey, a defunct blogspot blog of ours only has 35 inbounds and it managed to keep its PR2.

Here’s what we found out about a sudden loss in PR:

1. There maybe fewer links coming to ReapMoneyOnline.

Hmnn, RMO currently has 2,000 backlinks. Even a fourth of those must count for something.

2. The links coming to RMO are scoring a lower value than they did previously.

This is possible but we can’t possibly check 2,000 links. We did try one and that blog’s PR has been reduced from 4 to 3 (RMO is in the blogroll).

3. Google’s approach to PR has changed and things are displayed differently.

Now, is this possible? Are there indications that Google has changed rules mid-game? The Google webmasters guidelines seems to be their old self.

There were also “theories” of what could possibly have changed. Such as:

1. Google has decided to devalue non-independent 3rd party votes. Specifically, links coming from directories, comments, and completely unrelated blog rolls.
2. Spam links can occur within a site. Like our tags linking to the tag page. This a little blurry for us too and we have to do more digging on it as the tags do link to the tag page in most WordPress themes.
3. The usual duplicate content. A note, however: Jill Whalen contends Google does not reduce PR for duplicate contents. The Search Engine Page Results (SERP) can be affected but not the PR. And YES, we’re careful RMO don’t have any duplicate content within the blog but it’s been scraped a number of times.

The good new is we got reassured that Page Rank does not equate to Page Ranking in the SERPs. We did a brief search of the most common keywords that gave us hits from Google and the articles were still where they were. Oh well, we surely would love to have those little green pixels back — they’re like a badge and advertisers and visitors do like them — but we can’t put more time into this PR thingy as we have other projects to do.

We just hope our sponsors from Project Wonderful who has kept RMO hosted and running will turn a blind eye to it as well. BTW, congratulations for those who attained a higher PR during the last update and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO GOOGLE.

Did anybody else got slapped? Care to share your observations?

In a previous post, Targeting Geograhic Niches with Google Trends, we highlighted one possible use for that popular webmastering tool. There is another free online keyword tool that uses data from Google trends that is even better, the WordTracker Gtrends Keyword Tool. We have used it for 4 months and it is indeed a powerful keyword research tool. Here’s how to use it to get the right keywords for our articles.

Step 1. Open the keyword tool in a browser.

Click here to open WordTracker Gtrends in a new tab. As shown in the screenshot below, the homepage has a column titled “thesaurus” (encircled in red). If the keyword we are researching has several related terms, the link will appear here. A nifty feature to spread our nets wider to catch more traffic.

We enter the keyword we want to research in the field encircled in red. For this example, we used “ways to make money online.”

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Step 2. Check out the list of keywords or key phrases.

The next page will give us a list of keywords or key phrases related to “ways to make money online.” We can drill down further by clicking any link or we can click the button on the rigth side that looks like a graph icon to see the the details for each keyword.

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Step 3. Check out the competition and visitors for a particular keyword.

The next page will provide us with the number of pages in Google that contain “ways to make money online” (competition) and the approximate number of visitors that the number one ranking site receives per day. A Google Trends graph below will give us an idea if “ways to make money online” is still worth using for future searches.

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The best combination we want is less competition and more visitors. As we can see, “ways to make money online,” isn’t exactly a keyword we should target.

Trends is a Google webmasters’ tool that shows us the hottest searches from 2004 up to this moment. Bloggers and webmasters most often use it to catch and ride the wave of the latest Google hot trends for popular searches and incorporate related keywords in their content to partake of the massive Google traffic.

There’s another use for the tool we want to highlight, that of targeting geographic niches with Google trends search terms. Well, that’s how we use it for anyway.

Step 1. Open Google Trends in browser.

Click here to open Google trends in a new tab. To illustrate, we will compare the key phrases “make money online” and “ways to make money online.” Let’s key in “make money online” in the field provided and click the Search Trends button …

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Step 2. See where the traffic for “make money online” comes from.

Browse to the bottom of the page and see where the traffic for “make money online” mostly originates. This is the screenshot of the top 5 countries where searchers key-in this particular key phrase…

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Step 3. Compare the results for “ways to make money online.”

Now, enter the key phrase “ways to make money online” at the search filed and click the button. Browse to the bottom and see the results (note: trends change daily and results may vary) …

We can drill down per country, estate, and city for specific niches. The results can help us decide on what keywords or key phrases to use so the right persons can find our blogs or websites with Google.

Any idea on how we can fully use the power of Google Trends?

Before anything else, what is a bounce rate? It has nothing to do with the spherical humans depicted in the animated movie Wall-E. It’s another way for Google to say our blogs or sites are not making the grade. Specifically, it tells us how many pages a visitor to our site browses per visit. It is expressed in percentage and the lower it is, the better.

ReapMoneyOnline recently crashed and we have to start afresh. We thought it would be a good time to monitor our traffic data in Google Analytics, taking a close look at RMO’s bounce rate. So we culled data from August 10 to August 20 and here they are…

To have something for comparison, we underligned the entries from EntreCard (this should not be construed in any other way) in red. Data from the search engine were underligned in green. As we can see, the bounce rates for visitors coming from the search engines are significantly lower, with Google the lowest.

This is not a scientific research but it should give us an idea on how to lower our bounce rates, if we are inclined to do so. It is also heartening to know that visitors from Google have a liking for poking around our sites since we can stack the cards in our favor with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Is this observation repeated in other blogs or websites?