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Google has just dropped a bombshell on many sites who obviously thought they’d got SERPS licked. They’ve cut huge swathes off the PageRank scores of many big name sites including engadget.com, forbes.com and problogger.net.

In some cases the figure has dropped by as many as THREE places (remember PR is not a linear scale: a PR of 2 is not just TWICE as good as a PR of 1; it’s something like SEVEN TIMES better!)

Which begs two questions …

• Why have Google done this, and
• What does it mean for the affected sites?

Taking the second first, the answer is not entirely clear. PageRank has been a controversial issue for some while now; some even argue it’s meaningless. It’s usually summed up as “the number of good sites pointing to yours”, and although the precise PR algorithm has changed since the original Google patent, it’s still largely based upon “backlinks”.

Put very simply, the better the PageRank of sites which link to yours, the better your PageRank will be. Conversely, lots of links from poor sites can actually harm your page rank; that’s one reason why link-swapping campaigns are such poor value if your site is already doing well.

Incidentally, the PR you see in the Google Toolbar or other SEO tool may be misleading: Google calculates PageRank on a regular basis, but the figure it displays to the world is “out of date” by several months.

What’s behind Google’s recent PR raid seems to be a question over the validity of these backlinks. Of late, one of the tools of the professional SEO has been to sidestep the problem of gathering backlinks by natural, organic means — which usually takes a very long time — by running “backlink campaigns”. These exercises can often run into many thousands of dollars and consist of “buying” stories on well-placed blogs, and links from directories, forums and other sites. Sites like PayPerPost.com exist solely to put willing bloggers in touch with SEOs looking for another backlink.

Recently, however, Google announced a crackdown on websites and search agencies that were buying links in order to artificially ramp-up search position (you can see a fuller list of the sites affected here). This chimes in with the search giant’s stated aim of attempting to make web searches honest — if you search for something, they argue, what you should get is a list of the most appropriate sites, not those with the biggest SEO budget. Content, once more, is king!

This leaves me in a quandary. My day job is get the free mobile phone calls site Barablu.com back on the top of the heap where it belongs, and my weapon of choice is to improve the content of the site by writing more, getting more people to contribute and making the site itself more accessible, more usable and simply more fun!

However, one thing that Barablu lacks — mainly because, unlike the competition, it’s never bothered with SEO before — is backlinks. Barablu’s current PR is 5 and that’s lower than its rivals but (these days) suddenly higher than searchengineguide.com and seo-scoop.com. Suddenly, the attractiveness of a backlinks campaign is less than it was.

Besides, these days PageRank is just one of a hundred or so metrics used by Google to order web sites. Does that make it irrelevant? At the time of writing, this very site has a PR of ZERO, yet it still tops Google searches for some terms.

Yet on reflection, I still think PR is relevant. It still seems to have some bearing over just how often your site gets indexed and how deeply and there are many other differences you notice when your Google PR increases.

So I reckon backlink campaigns will continue, only probably much more carefully, and much less visibly.

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Everyone likes good publicity: just look at the film posters quoting reviews of the movie. Of course, these can be misleading.

A recent blurb for the TV movie The Girl in the Café quoted The Oregonian newspaper:

“An endearing romantic comedy.”

What The Oregonian actually said was:

“This new offering from HBO Films is at its heart a bit of political propaganda wrapped into an endearing romantic comedy that starts losing its laughs when it gets to Reykjavik and decides its teachable moment has arrived.”

You can see more of these at Gelf Magazine.

You probably don’t have to be so economical with the actualité. But it’s not so easy to bathe in glory. One great content idea is a gallery of what people have said about your company or site. However, content usually comes with a price, and as we discovered recently with a CNBC video clip of our CEO, simply linking to a video or article is not enough. Within hours of linking to the clip on CNBC, they imposed a subscription-only tag. There’s nothing suspicious here: in a charged-content model, content is usually free for a set period before the curtain comes down.

News providers such as magazines, newspapers and broacast media have been arguing for years about charging for content (news agencies like Reuters and the Press Association survive by charging for content, but their main customers are the aforesaid magazines, newspapers and broacast media). Because the enduring ethos of the internet is “everything is free”, it’s been very difficult to get drive-by surfers to pay for anything. Some have tried. Most have failed. TIME magazine charged for content from their magazine for four years and made a profit (the only part of the operation that did!!), but when their sister site AOL decided to open up their content to everyone, TIME decided to drop the “curtain” — and still made a profit!

Incidentally, TIME used to charge for magazine content seven days after it hit the newsstands on the basis that people would pay for a magazine online which they couldn’t buy on the streets. The exception were religious stories — which they charged for immediately: religious feeling as it is in the U.S., people would pay for that content at any time. Religious stories were the big money earners!

The fact is that some copy is off limits to non-payers (or at least non-subscribers), and while a “What They Say About Us” page would be great, it will not be easy.

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The key to motivating people to contribute to any project or activity is finding their personal angle: what’s in it for them?

I’ve not been a member of the Regus team for very long to meet enough people to know what flicks their switch but, in the wider world, behavioural scientists say that it comes down to food, habitation and mate competition. Now, I’m not sure we can introduce online dating, planning rules prohibit using offices for residential purposes and, trust me, I’ve tasted Regus’s sandwiches.

Contributing to the website MUST become a part of everyday life for selected Regus employees and to facilitate that it has to be made painless (or as painless as we can) as well as rewarding. I faced similar problems at my previous emplyer in recent years and only recently — with endorsement from higher management AND extra resource and incentives — did people begin to realise that online HELPS them, not hinders.

What will be make or break is a good Content Management System. The CMS displayed today by Ektron sets a high standard. Above all, it appears to be an easy sytem to use with and intuitive interface.

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