Many of the higher profile bloggers have recently had their PR ranking dinged by -1 or -2 points by Google for various reasons:

Andy Beard -2

John Chow -2

Problogger -2

And the list goes on and on… I was surprised, but then my own blog has been dinged by -1. Then there are some well known blogs with no page rank at all, such as CashQuests, despite having some hundreds of readers and a high Alexa ranking. So now, we’re all wondering why. Rumors abound about a new system called Trust Rank. But few poe

My own response is really rather obvious after spending a few minutes thinking about it.

If you are serious about making money from your blog, then you will need to focus more on selling advertising for traffic, not for SEO. At the moment, we’ll be waiting for responses from TLA and PPP on this issue. Suffice to say, PPP is already working on their response (called Argus) and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a much better system than Google has for tracking traffic.

Cut your reliance directly and indirectly on Google. You can continue to serve your Adsense ads, but I suggest that you find other ways to earn money from advertising. I think the online advertising on blogs platform will survive these changes from Google, but bloggers will need to adapt over time.

Cut your reliance on Google search, adapt to using other search engines. You also need to change your behavior in some ways. Don’t entirely give up Google services and products, there are some good products there. But add variety to your online world.

I wouldn’t suggest boycotting Google altogether, but I would like to remind you and of course Google that Google’s success is mandated on the behavior of its users. If we hadn’t started using Google, it wouldn’t have got a multi-hundred billion dollar price tag! At the moment, I don’t think that’s feasible, but we can modify our own behavior in minor ways, and that will have an impact.

How has Google’s regular dance affected you? Do you think things will be different this time? Do comment.