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A friend of mine has recently launched a blog on an unsuspecting world, starting from scratch.

She downloaded a copy of WordPress, bought some blog-only web space for a startling £27 a year and took one of the many WordPress themes and tweaked the content until it looked right to her. This all happened on June 27.

Then she regularly surfed the web news directories, pulled out the stories that caught her eye, rewrote them and stuck them on her new site at the rate of at least three a day.

Now, with a bit of a tweak here and there, and the inclusion of a WordPress plug-in that creates a sitemap on the fly, she is beginning to scent the sweet smell of success. While her blog has no PageRank and so far no-one is linking to it, she is already getting a daily index from Google and others.

I can’t tell you much more. I’ve promised that I won’t let on what the blog is called, or link to it: apparently, she’s using it as a test bed to see just how hard (or easy) it is to get top SEO purely from content. If it were me, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops, but then I’m a bloke so I have an ego to massage.

I can admit that I’m extremely jealous of her success because for technical reasons I’m still unable to add any pages to the site which is my day-job.

But my friend is right. It proves that once you take away all the coding factors, like semantic XHTML and proper linkage to and from the site, good SEO is REALLY all about content these days.

Provide good content, and provide it regularly, and Google and its rivals will come knocking.

According to best estimates of when the next PageRank update takes place, we have just 55 days to see how much daily indexing equates to good PR.

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So, you know I wrote about the cuts in Google’s page rank and how it was hitting people who’d bought in links and were feeling the pain of Google’s ethical stance? Well now I’m not so sure.

Yesterday, Barablu — my latest SEO project — felt the sting of demotion too. Its page rank fell one point, from 5 to 4.

Yet (as far as I can see) Barablu has NEVER in the past operated any dodgy practices, especially link buying: I wish the same could be said for the competition. No, the loss of a PR point in this case at least must be more than a Google moral backlash.

As usual, Google are keeping tight-lipped about the reasons behind the recent PR massacre and to be sure there are many sites around who’ve suffered more than Barablu. Yet, what makes this whole adjustment even more puzzling for me is that I know for a fact that sites which don’t exist are maintaining their page rank!

Now I’m not talking about some dodgy blackhat technique: the site in question — which I shouldn’t name for confidentiality reasons — ceased operations back in July because the owner couldn’t afford (or couldn’t be bothered) to pay his site dues. It was duly decommissioned and all the pages deleted; if you go there now you get the usual 404 errors.

However, if you search Google for the site right now you’ll be told that it has 41 pages and a PR of 4, albeit with no backlinks! As they say, go figure!

Go Tell The Marines!

In truth, Barablu’s real problem is years of unwitting, benign neglect. It was first in its field — making free calls using a mobile phone — and it still out-features the competition but it languishes in the lower reaches of the search engine rankings on almost all of its keyword phrases because, until now, no-one ever said anything. A recent comment on an Italian blog summed it up: “Even if Barablu is not very visible — not advertised properly — the software offers some interesting services you should try.”

As I write, I’m waiting to unleash a new Barablu website on an unsuspecting world, but for now all I can practically do is to encourage everyone here that I can to blog their socks off about Barablu and its associated technological fields via the Barablu Blog (catchy name, don’t cha think!).

For you see, as I think I’ve been saying for a while now, Content is King! And even with the meagre resources at hand right now, Barablu’s SEO is actually improving. See you at the top … .

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