My PageRank Went Up!

Twenty years ago or more, people used to maintain home pages. Some of these people who maintained these “home pages” would become obsessed with their website, their search engine referrals, even their search engine rankings. This gave rise to the techniques and the marketing tactics known as search engine optimization. While maintaining my hobby website and home page I learned of these dark arts.

Today and even back in 2005 it was pretty lame to blog about your PageRank going up. And as someone who used Opera on Mac OS X I couldn’t use the Google Toolbar, but every so often I would use FireFox for which I have the toolbar installed. According to the Google’s own toolbar the PageRank for www.muschamp.ca was 4 on October 26th 2005 as was blog.muschamp.ca but nurgle.muschamp.ca went down to 2!

Even funnier some guy wanted to buy text ads on nurgle.muschamp.ca for his poker sites. I couldn’t figure it out, maybe being PageRank 4 is some hurdle, but I can’t see what Nurgle has to do with Poker.

Does PageRank matter anymore?

My PageRank is now a mystery Google no longer makes this information publicly available, but others estimate it and insist the metric has value. The browser I now use the most is Safari and I mainly care about the first page results in search engines for my name or variations of my name combined with another keyword. I’ve gone through a lot of difficulties keeping this website online and functioning and a lot has happened in the world of search engine optimization and blogging since October 2005.

In 2019 I undertook a major overhaul of this blog to try and make it better. I employed some of the latest search engine optimization expert advice and techniques so perhaps my PageRank may yet go above four. Alas I don’t think the net result or the ROI was worth it.

Blog maintenance and maintaining search rankings is hard

The same can be said for maintaining this website for twenty years. Although I’m currently employed, web design or web development, let alone search engine optimization is not what I do for a living. Self marketing or building my brand online also didn’t really work for me. What did work was stubbornness, hard work, and sacrifice. In 2024, despite believing the ROI to be negligible, I once again overhauled this website and blog, specifically the taxonomy.

Taxonomy along with internal linking is supposed to be a major contributor to search engine success, but Google ain’t what it used to be and PageRank isn’t something I worry about. If you have thoughts on Google’s PageRank algorithm or search engine optimization you can leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on October 26th, 2005, it was last edited on May 20th, 2024 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Google, PageRank, SEO.