Green Tranquilizes

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About Google's Toolbar-PageRank.

Widely ignored by savvy webmasters and search engine experts, every 3-4 months the publishing Internet community celebrates a spectacular event: Google updates its Toolbar-PageRank!

Site owners around the globe hectically visit all their pages to view the magic green presented by Google's Toolbar. If the green bar enlarged a pixel or even two, they hurry to the next webmaster board praising their genius. Otherwise they post 'Google is broke'.

Once the Toolbar-PR update is settled, folks in fear of undefined penalties by the allmighty Google check all their outgoing links, removing everything with a PR less than 4/10. Next they add a REL=NOFOLLOW attribute to all their internal links where the link target shows a white or gray bar on the infallible toolbar. Trembling they hide in the 'linking is evil' corner of the world wide waste of common sense universe for 3-4 months again.

Where is the call for rationality leading those misguided lemmings back to mother earth? Hey folks, Toolbar-PR is just fun, it means next to nothing. Green tranquilizes, but white or gray is no reason to panic. The funny stuff Google shoves into your toolbar is an outdated snapshot without correlation to current rankings or even real PageRank. It is by no means an indicator how valuable a page is in reality, so please LOL (link out loud) if the page seems to provide a value for your visitors.

As a matter of fact, the above said will change nothing. Green bar fetishists don't even listen to GoogleGuy posting "This is just plain old normal toolbar PageRank".

Friday, July 15, 2005

Googlebots go Fishing with Sitemaps

Take Free SEO Advice With a Grain of Salt

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