Come on people, Google originally created the pagerank system to basically show how good a site is. To simplify it completely, it’s based off of quality inbound links. Lovely natural inbound links from people who genuinely think that your site is good. Not links that you’ve paid loads of money for to try and give the impression that your site is good so that you can ultimately use that false impression of greatness to sell links from your site.

And you wonder why Google finally decided to clamp down on Pageranking and what constitutes a quality link?

“But what about Statcounter and PHPBB?” you say.

Come on, think about it. Google want to measure PR and a website’s importance by the QUALITY of inbound links. Are all these millions of footer links to those sites quality links? They’re not backlinks by choice due to the site’s quality, they’re linking back to those sites because PHPBB put that link in their script and ask you to keep it.

Compare those former PR8 and PR9 sites to sites that have come out of the update with their high PR in tact. Apple for example. Where are all their backlinks? They don’t get a backlink every time you download iTunes or use your iPod, but they get the benefit of having their branding there – much link a footer link on PHPBB. All those Apple backlinks are natural, not planted, and not bought.

So stop whining about Google, and start complimenting them on finally taking a stand and sorting out the backlinks from the craplinks.

They’re a pain in the backside to build up, especially quality backlinks, and unless you want to go down the route of purchasing some high PR backlinks, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and do some hard work.

Now, I’m all for shortcuts that make life easier and leave you more time to put your feet up, so I’ve been doing a bit of experimenting lately which I’m hoping I’ll find the results of when the next Google pagerank update comes along.

I’ve done quite a lot of reading up on forums and various SEO related sites about how useful Myspace backlinks actually are. The general consensus seems to be that Myspace is a brilliant marketing tool – which it definitely is – and that Myspace backlinks are practically useless.

I don’t buy that though, not yet anyway. So I’ve been doing some experimenting over the last few months on one of my sites, and I’ve delved into the world of Myspace. It didn’t take long for my site’s name and url to get around given (a) it was music based, (b) part of a small niche on the net, and (c) actually useful to a large portion of Myspace users. So with this in mind, it wasn’t long before more and more people would request to be a friend of mine, people would pick up the link to my site via my profile and share it with each other via comments on each other’s pages – and each time they’re doing that, they’re adding a backlink. In just a few months hundreds of backlinks have been created, and I could just sit back and let people do the work for me. Great stuff!

Now, I’ve no idea how this has effected the site in question’s PR yet, but what I can tell you is that it’s flown up the SERP’s and search engine traffic has increased dramatically – not to mention the extra traffic generated from people passing the site around Myspace, so the experiment has certainly been beneficial thus far.

As for increasing my PR? Well, the big argument against Myspace backlinks seems to be that they’re generally just a lot PR0’s. I have however noticed my site’s link appearing in the comments section of a few profiles with PR’s of 2-5, so they’re not all totally useless. And as I mentioned, the SERP positions have increased on a weekly basis. So now, I’m just waiting to see if that little green bar grows a little, and to find out just how many useless Myspace backlinks you need to make them useful.

I’ll keep you posted!