Midlife Musings

Did I spell that right? My spell checker dislikes foreign phrases, go figure. Anyway, I guess if you aren’t living under a rock, you know by know that Google has been dropping the PR of bloggers for the past 20 or so hours. I’m basically writing this post just in case someone expects me to say something about it, and then it will be done, and I will have spoken, and you can all sleep easy tonight.

I run more blogs than I have fingers. Some of them are pretty darn good and some of them are merely so-so. A couple are more aggravation than they were worth from the get. All of them now have a page rank of 0, including the one that was a 5 a year ago. Ha! I had a PR of 5 and did not even know what it was. When I first saw what was happening last night, I did feel like puking. One of my blogs has 183 back links, and dropped from 3 to 0 like a stone. But just like I said a couple weeks ago when Google started the foreplay that led to this rough-em-up, my blog is more than a number. My value is more than my page rank. My visits are up, up, up. My SERPs for my keywords are better than they have ever been, and I plan to just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. When I woke up this morning, I was ready to write, and the first thing I did was to twitter “I blog because I can’t not blog. I blog because I can’t not blog. I blog because I can’t not blog.” That is absolutely true for me, and if I never get paid another penny for blogging, still I will blog. I blogged before paid blogging, and I will blog right on, because that’s what I do.

Even as I was working on the post about Vegas today, Ted posted on the Izea blog for us to avoid mentioning PPP in our blog posts if we wanted to protect ourselves. Google is looking for the word PayPerPost, the phrase Pay Per Post (yeah, that’s wrong, I know) and any of it’s derivatives, and also for the names of any competing services. (Did you get that I am not following Ted’s advice?) Love you Ted, k, thanks, but no. I did not allow PPP itself to tell me how to blog, when they tried. I am certainly not going to let Google dictate my editorial policy. They’ve only managed to give me pennies to the thousands of dollars I have made with various sponsored posts, and haven’t even paid out on that because I’ve yet to reach the magic $100. In 18 month of adsense use. Whatever. And just so you know…all these posts I am writing about PPP, Izea and SocialSpark lately? For free, because I could. Because they are doing important, industry changing things. And also, because the people who work there are FUN. And Clever. And Witty. And My Friends. Not write about my friends? No.

Now, one more thing, and this little tidbit is in defense of the internet giant, whose name Trevor has just asked us all not to speak for the rest of the day. They said PR was an internal mechanism. They informed us it was proprietary information. They warned advertisers and consumers not to rely on it for decision making purposes. They have only changed what was theirs to change. They haven’t taken anything from anyone, because it never belonged to any of us anyway. It was always theirs and frankly, they can have it back. And also shove it. Hope those Raymond Weil watches don’t get caught on anything.

Technorati Tags: Google, page rank, foreplay, PayPerPost, Pay Per Post, sponsored posts, adsense, PPP, Izea, SocialSpark, My Friends