If you are making money blogging, you’d definitely know how important ranking systems like Google PageRank are. For example, if you have a PR5 blog, you can make a tidy sum of money from paid posts like Pay Per Post and Text Link Ads.

The last update was supposed to be on June or July but until today there is nothing.

This is certainly bad news for PPP posties like me who are waiting to get new blogs approved. Lots of hard work went into making new sites get some respectable traffic. I was expecting two new PR5 blogs and a couple of PR3 websites. Google is not happy with companies and individuals who sell links and get paid for it. JohnChow.com is a good example of a website getting punished for this.

Google Punishment
This is the logical response from Google - do away with PageRank so that the paid links marketplace cannot use this as measurement of a site’s worth. Companies like TextLinkAds and PayPerPost rely heavily on Google PR to accept new members and rank members sites.

Internally Google still maintain their Page Rank algorithm but they are not updating the Page Rank for the public to see. Now only Google knows what your PageRank is. This is unfair as I have many 5 month old PR 0 websites which I’m confident is definitely no longer PR 0 in Google internal page ranking system.

Alexa anyone?
So without Google PageRank, this means the next ranking system is Alexa which everyone knows is simply not reliable. It can be “gamed” where some people try all sort of methods to artificially inflate their Alexa ranking. How many times have I seen some really high traffic websites with extremely poor Alexa ranking and some totally bogus website with fantastic ranking.

I don’t know about you but I’m hoping Google will change their mind and carry on releasing their PR result for the public as they have in the past. Some say that Google PR is not reliable or accurate. However, it’s still the top ranking system being used.

What now?
Kumiko of cashquests.com says she is going to use Alexa and RSS readership to judge the value of a site. I guess that’s all we can do now. Concentrate on Alexa and RSS subscription numbers until something new comes along.

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