I’m not bragging. It’s a fact. My blogs get a lot of attention. They win awards. I have a lot of incoming links, and a lot of steady traffic. The PageRank of my blog - well, actually, I don’t know. I have no idea and haven’t paid attention for several years. It doesn’t matter.

Most of the stuff that other bloggers worry and fuss over doesn’t matter to me. I don’t look at my blog stats unless I have a good reason. I don’t write to beg for traffic nor attention. Honestly, I just do what I do and people like it. Any search engine page ranking success I’ve had is due to experience and common sense. No games. I hate the games.

I tried to explain this to someone just entering the blog market recently, and they just couldn’t get it. “But you’re THE Lorelle! You’re famous!”

Nope. I’m just me. I’m just you. I’m just like everyone else, I’ve just been doing this longer. So pardon my arrogance for just a moment, but I’ve been there, done that, and now I think I’m paying attention to what’s more important than some numbers and scores.

What matters most to me is helping people.
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A reader recently asked me how he could repeat the traffic magnet power of a post he wrote a year ago featuring the logo of a local football team. He told me that he gets continuous traffic to that post daily, and he wants to repeat it, bringing even more daily traffic into his blog.

Traffic magnets can be fleeting or consistent over time. We aren’t talking about exclusive pictures of celebrities or the Digg-effect blog post that brings in thousands of visitors in one or two days, then traffic drifts off to nothing. Traffic magnets continue to be draws to your blog over the long haul - one, two, even four or five years after publishing.

While many believe that any traffic is good traffic, traffic magnets come in two very distinctive audience groups: one-shot deals or easy conversions.
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Do you tag yourself? Honestly? No, this is not a game.

With everyone back on the tag versus categories versus tags bandwagon, have you checked to make sure you are tagging yourself?

Inside of Lorelle on WordPress is the tag attribute that turns “Lorelle on WordPress” into a tag.

<a href="http://lorelle.wordpress.com/" title="Lorelle on WordPress" rel="tag">Lorelle on WordPress</a>

When I write my name in a link, I also include a tag:

<a href="http://lorelle.wordpress.com/" title="Lorelle" rel="tag">Lorelle</a>

This makes “Lorelle” a tag.

When I write about the Blog Herald, I also put that in a tag, so the words “Blog Herald” get into the tag clouds on the site as well as the tag search engines and directories.

I use the same tag technique for WordPress, WordPress.com, and every taggable link I write to help associate what I write with those tags.

Are you tagging yourself and your blog? The rel="tag" is all a link needs to turn it from a link into a linking tag. It’s what defines a tag.

If you aren’t tagging yourself and your blog, it’s a great branding technique you may be missing out on.

I know that lately, there continues to be a lot of kvetching about Google, Page Rank, and spam blog issues. This are legitimate concerns, but I have a bigger bitch with Google. Clean up Blogger, NOW!

I was contacted today by a newspaper reporter from Charlotte, North Carolina, to comment on the death of a local blogger, part of a pair of women who have taken Charlotte by storm with their social commentary blog. I wanted to research this myself to write about it here, so I headed to Google, the search engine of choice, and entered in death, social, bloggers, charlotte, north carolina and clicked over to Blog Search when Web and News came up empty. I expected to get a few hits as the reporter said the death of this young woman was the “talk of the town” and the community was turning out to support the surviving blogger.

What I got were ten search results all from Google Blogger/Blogspot sites.

My first reaction? Google must now give priority to their own bloggers in the search results. It’s a good assumption based upon the evidence.
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Why are backlinks important? Backlinks are another jargon term for links that “come back” to your blog via blog post articles, blogrolls, comments, and such on other blogs. They are also known as referrals or incoming links. In the world of Google PageRank™, links to your blog count. The more incoming links the better, right?

Semi-right. Yes, incoming links to your blog count, but Google now uses TrustRank™ in their algorithm. Though it’s usage is still in its early days, TrustRank evaluates incoming links based upon the page ranking and “quality of trust” of the blog sending the links to your blog, the keywords within the two linking blogs, and a lot of other information and details. If the data doesn’t add up, that incoming link might not mean much. If the data does add up, it could be a boon to your blog and its page ranking.

The key to getting links to your blog is getting quality links, links that improve your blog by association, not numbers.
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I’m the first to admit that I, too, was sucked into the Google Game, the game of playing with my blog to ensure the success of my blog’s participation in Google world domination control of all things searchable. As part of my ongoing series on improving your blog tips, one of the redundant bits of advice I give to my clients is how to play the Google Game while not playing the Google Game.

Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Playing the Google Games means understanding how Google’s PageRank algorithm works, which is much like predicting the stock market in relationship to the weather. Sometimes the weather cooperates, as does the stock market, but other times, both are unpredictable and based upon factors that twist and turn in the wind.
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I was alerted (thanks Jordan) that across all many some data centers, many sites now have their PageRank dropped down to zero, including such prominent domains as the New York Times and TechCrunch, but also Yahoo, and strangely enough Google itself. With this change in PageRank, one does wonder whether or not PayPerPost has truly been singled out, or this is an attempt to destroy (and perhaps rebuild?) PageRank as a metric once and for all.

More as it comes in.

Update: Ionut from Google Operating System has chimed in below — what we see on the toolbar is probably the official pagerank. Perhaps the PageRank zeroes have more to do with datacenter updates than anything else.

Update: In hand checking some of IP for data centers at http://www.digpagerank.com/, it seems like many data centers are not in fact down; the conflicting results, coupled with the persistent zero level at the tool-bar level of previously “zeroed” blogs suggests that this is likely, in fact a data center issue.  Thank goodness there’s a question mark at the end of that title. ;)