Qtpies7, that's why Google has used this method. From everything I've heard about traffic going to the newly PR0 sites Google has hidden their PR. Internally the PR is what it should be, they're just not showing it.

It really depends on what you mean by "better way to get paid for blogging". If you mean easier, there aren't many. If you mean amount earned, there are a few. They're much more difficult and take more time to build.

I still believe Google would have gotten a better response if they'd just said something about this before hiding PR. I mean a public announcement. Not something hidden away in a hard to find cryptic page of guidelines or on an employee's blog.

I think a business can survive without google, but I can't do paid posting without them because advertisers use their ranking system to decide who gets the job. But then we lose the rank for taking the opportunity. There is no way for me to continue doing it until advertisers start using a different ranking system.
If I don't do paid posting, I don't care what I rank with Google. But I want to continue with the posting because I haven't found a better way to get paid for blogging.

Thanks Holly. Don't forget that some of the Level 3 referral traffic can almost be counted as Google.

How many times have you searched for something in Google, went to a page, then had to click an outbound link to get what you wanted? I know it's happened to me quite a bit.

Elizabeth, it seemed appropriate. When I found that picture I knew I had to use it in this post. *L*

I keep coming back to look at the lolcat photo, because I need some cheering up. The only thing keeping me from being totally depressed about the loss of my PageRank is seeing how many links I have using the Yahoo! Site explorer badge.

This is a great post about google. I'm linking to it from my post also. The information here is priceless and I agree there are so many other search engines out there that can bring you the same amount or more traffic then google

Yeah, if you've been focused on Google there are some shifts in thought that are kind of tough. That's part of getting your site "in front of the right people". Networking becomes much more important.

Hard to ignore Google even if they're only driving 20% of your traffic overall, as they are in our case.

They still drive 65% of all search engine traffic sent to us. They ourproform, by a factor of two to one, the other 35 search engines combines.

So, while I understand your point to diversify, Google is still the dinosaur of the search engine world.

And search engine traffic is where your newest clients come from.

Almost 60% of our traffic is repeat book marks. We're doing something right,

But we still need those totally new clients to capture those repeat visitors.

Thanks, I appreciate that. :)

Hi Jason,

This is one of the better articles I've read on the topic. I've added it to my more bad press about Google post. ;)

Cheers!
Snoskred