After the successful auction I reported yesterday… Well, seems that Cashquests’ inspiring blog by Kumiko Suzuki is gone… I logged into see what was happening after her blog was sold, and to my horror I found this ugly domain place holder. All other posts are now redirecting to that domain parking mess. Ugly as sin… I’m sure she must be shocked, too.

I can’t even bring myself to link to the CRAPPY Domain that has taken its place. Of course, its Page Rank has gone back to zero after such a huge change… Let’s hope that the new owner is planning to resurrect the blog. After all, moving a domain, posts and a blog to a new location isn’t that hard…

We’ll be checking back in seven days to see what is happening. I don’t see how with a top 5000 ranking on Technorati, a PR of 5, and a high Alexa ranking that giving up this blog can be a good thing… What are your thoughts? I’m sure you’ll miss her blog as much as I do… I know I’ll miss the traffic from that link she sold me!

Well, this is five stories that I have been following that perhaps others have read or not!

CashQuests.com: sold for $15,000

Yes, after all those posts on creating revenue streams that you can use to sell a website, flipping websites, and increasing eyeballs and traffic, the blog was sold for about 11.5 times monthly revenue.

I’m wishing Kumiko all the best on the sale, but I wonder if the $15K will help to ease those pangs of loss as she realizes she no longer has a prominent blog, or that she has to blog every few days! I wonder what she’s upto… Still no official comment from her, though. You can find the story at Sitepoint. And the stats are impressive, too:

– Traffic: 16k unique visitors per month
– PageRank: The homepage is PR 5 and many inner pages range from PR1 – PR4.
– Alexa: 20,000
– Technorati: Top 5k ranking
– RSS Readership: Over 900 readers are subscribed.
– Over 9,800 backlinks from other sites
– 222 posts and 2,890 comments published

Kwan: I Don’t Understand Google PageRank Anymore

Well, Michael, who does? More importantly, why bother? If you blog for yourself, your PR shouldn’t be that important. If you blog for your business, then you won’t really be doing reviews, linking and so on, anyway. And if you blog for money, it’s easy to find alternatives to make money that don’t involve PR, Google or text links (or any combination thereof). So let’s not sweat it.

I hope, though, Michael Kwan is still busy writing reviews, but I wonder how many reviews he’s getting these days. I hope he’s getting lots, but I fear that many of the original opportunities have dried up in the heat over Google’s PR monkeybusiness. I’ve noticed how many of my opps have gone since I lost my PR3 just a few weeks ago.

RealRank: is it really here yet?

After the Google Debacle, many of the competitors to AdSense have started fighting for their lives, as Google aims to strike directly at the heart of text linking business based on PR rankings. Payperpost is embarking on creating a rival Ranking system to join PR as a way to rank blogs in the age of Social Networking. It’s been called several things, but the name that seems to stick is ‘RealRank’ (get it, Google?)… and it aims to measure a number of factors, including audience, traffic, authority, etc. to provide a much fuller picture to advertisers. It will be rolled out as a part of Argus, but it seems that PPP is now fasttracking it because without PR rankings business for them is getting ‘sticky’ for sure.

Ted Murphy is quoted as saying: Last night Google decided to go after some of the bloggers in our network, reducing their PR from whatever they previously had to zero. Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.

SocialSpark is still under wraps at the moment. But RealRank is due to go live today. You can find more discussion here about RealRank. Let’s see if we can’t update the blog with an image … Nothing yet. But I’ll keep on it until I get some screenshots!

In the meantime, you can watch the video.

Thanks.

I was filled with horror yesterday when I discovered that my potentially PR4 blog had had its PR reduced to zero, yes, that’s a ‘0’, a big fat ‘oh’. Nothing, nada… 875 posts, Tech, Alexa, and traffic all good, with 2 or 3K unique page views a month… And it’s worth nothing in Google’s eyes…

At first, I thought it was a glitch in the PR tools I was using but then I began to discover that many, many bloggers even those who’d had PR3s, 4s, and 5s, had simultaneously had their ranking reduced to ZERO by Google. Even big name bloggers have had their PR ranks reduced by upwards of 2 points.

Many other bloggers are just seriously p***ed off at Google for doing this. And why? Because it seems that Google want to be the only game in town for ranking, searching and monetizing websites. And that’s just not right. Google’s search engine is good, but Adsense is not, PageRank is now worthless, and competition is increasing…

Meanwhile, here are some of the reactions from others:

The thing about that thing, From Table4five blogger Elizabeth who writes…

But … I hate to tell them this, but they do not OWN THE INTERNET. The Internet was invented as a way to share information, plain and simple. “Oogle” might have it’s fingers in a lot of pies, but it is not the only game in town. There are other search engines, other RSS readers, other email systems. And I for one intend to give those other companies more of my business. …

The Community Izea Blog writes:

The problem with Google PageRank is that it is both self serving and irrelevant to actual traffic and influence. The arbitrary and unpredictable nature of this ranking system has left both bloggers and advertisers longing for accurate statistical data since long before PayPerPost. Unfortunately, there are few options out there when it comes to determining the value of a blog. While sites like Alexa attempt to estimate traffic they are inaccurate and do a terrible job when it comes to blogs with smaller niche audiences.

One of my favorite bloggers, Skeet has written about this, too. Skeet writes in colorful language:

I’m here to tell you folks, it doesn’t matter. At least not to me, and probably not to you if you see which way the wind is blowing. By using their new criteria for ranking blogs (whatever that might be) the Big G has shafted, not the bloggers, but themselves.

Other more well-known bloggers, too. AndyBeard, John Chow, etc… The list is getting longer by the minute, too… There are many excellent posts, too many to mention.

As you can guess, I’m angry, too. Google may own the index for Google, but I own my own blog. They can rank it any way they like, but I’ll be damned if they can tell me how to run my blog. Really, so I’m beginning my own campaign of action. I’m no David, but Google is a Goliath… I won’t be able to knock it down with a lucky strike of my sling, but… I’m going to chip away at it with the chisel of my words, supported by the hammer of my actions… It won’t be an easy victory, but it will be sweet.

I’ll outline my own plan of action against Google in the next few days… I don’t expect anyone to follow me, but I’ve had enough with this aggressive bullying behavior by a monopolistic company whose primary goal is now to eliminate competition in an illegal and uncompetitive manner. Is it time for us to be suing Google? Perhaps.

How has your blog been affected? Do you think it’s important or not? What are your plans now?