• Wanna know how to deal with A-listers and Internet Celebrities? Check out John Cow’s guest post over at John Chow’s blog.
• CopyBlogger asks this question: If content is the new advertising, then what does your advertising say about you?
• Are you a WordPress developer or theme designer? Need a quick and easy cheatsheet for the different WordPress functions? Check out WPCandy’s advanced WordPress Help Sheet.
• Check out this hilarious video about the “Dangers of Blogging” by Yossi Vardi. Via AJ‘s blog.
• Ever wonder what happens when a domain name expires? Hongkiat has a short explanation on this matter.
• Want to improve your blog readership? Learn how to develop relationships with your readers from BloggingTips.
• 7 types of blog posts which always seem to get links and traffic. A must read if you’re looking for more ways to improve your blog’s traffic and popularity.
• Ever had your computer crash on you? Atma Xplorer shares some tips on what to do when your PC dies. Good luck buddy! Hope you get your rig fixed soon.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

For Filipino owned blogs, among those that were penalized in the initial update were Yugatech, Retzwerx, Jozzua and Codamon just to mention a few. The reason? Most if not all, were brought about by paid or sponsored text link ads that didn’t use the nofollow attribute.

In the recent Google PageRank update, my blog JaypeeOnline dropped from a PR5 to a PR4. I thought that Google was done updating pageranks but apparently I was wrong because I received a comment yesterday from one of my regular readers, FruityOaty informing me that my blog just dropped to a PR3! I was surprised and disappointed but I couldn’t do anything. The only reason I can think of for my blog to get penalized was having sitewide TLA ads on my sidebar. The thing is I even removed the ads even before the initial update and I had all my featured links use the nofollow attribute. I guess it was too late. Anyways, I’ll try to file for a reinclusion at Google Webmaster Tools and hope they accept it.

I agree with the comment left by Markku on PinoyMoneyTalk’s post about the recent Google update.

The need for traditional traffic building is here again, emphasizing that content is still king.

Content is still king. This is a good reminder for established bloggers and a lesson for those who are starting. Fortunately for me, my blog traffic hasn’t been affected by the loss or drop in pagerank.

Btw, PinoyMoneyTalk has a list of several notable Filipino sites and blogs that were affected by the recent Google Pagerank update.

What do you think about the recent Google PageRank updates? Do you think Google will update PageRanks Did your blog lose or gained pagerank during the recent updates? Share your thoughts!

What happened? I had no idea. It’s normal for the number of my RSS subscribers to drop 10 readers at a time but for it to lose 65 readers overnight was weird. Since I don’t know what the reason was, I couldn’t do anything about so I thought to myself that I’d just wait until tomorrow and see what happens.

Later that afternoon, I got John Chow’s RSS feed via email and saw the title of his latest post – “How I Lost 4,993 RSS Subscribers Overnight“. I immediately knew that what ever reason he had for losing that much subscribers was the same reason I lost mine. From John’s post, I found out that the culprit was Google’s Feedfetcher and that it wasn’t showing the number of RSS subccribers using Google Reader. Btw, I’m sure John is happy that this didn’t happen during the RSS competition vs Shoemoney. Hehe

Though John Chow showed proof that the culprit was Google Feedfetcher, I still wasn’t sure and I wanted to confirm it so I decided to pay the Feedburner blog a visit and saw this Saturday Subscriber Count Drop?

If you saw your subscriber count drop precipitously in your Saturday, November 3rd summary from FeedBurner, the reason is that specific subscriber stats from Google Feedfetcher were offline because this service was apparently out late with friends on Friday night, and well, it completely slept through Saturday. It appears to have rallied, however, and amid firm declarations of “I’m never doing that again”, Feedfetcher has started diligently reporting subscriber numbers to us, early this morning Pacific Time. FeedBurner publishers’ subscriber counts should be closer to what you’d normally expect starting with reports that will be available on Monday morning.

There ya go! That explains everything. Good to know that it’s just temporary and that things should be back to normal on Monday morning.

Anyone else got worried by the sudden drop of RSS subscribers n the Feedburner chicklet? What percentage of your total RSS subscribers use Google Reader? How about you, do you use Google Reader? Share your thoughts!

The question now is, what is/are the reasons why these sites and blogs were penalized? No one can answer it except Google and for now we can only speculate and come up with different theories. One of the most popular theories is “paid links” that don’t use the nofollow attributes. Another theory is that Google is changing the PageRank algorithm.

If its about “paid links”, it doesn’t make sense because some of the blogs that got penalized don’t sell paid links. Two good examples are ProBlogger and Copyblogger. ProBlogger hasn’t sold paid links in months and Copyblogger never sold links. If its not about paid links, what is it then? Were they penalized for removing Adsense ads or is it just Google readjusting the PR scale?

Andy Beard who was penalized two weeks ago thinks that another reason for some of the penalties is a violation of Google guidelines:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

He explains that while some blogs don’t sell paid links, some of them got penalized because they were part of an extensive blog network and that they have massive interlinking between their network sites.

Dot com mogul John Chow, whose blog rank dropped from a PR 6 to a PR 4 has this to say:

I would say the most likely reason for this change is Google is messing around with link resellers like Text Link Ads. By downgrading a large chunk of the blogs on the Internet, Google has made that that much harder for the link resellers to sell links.

If you ask John, he’ll tell you not to worry too much about the recent PR update results. His advise is to check your blog’s search traffic over the next two weeks and if there’s no significant drop and/or remains the same, then PageRank is nothing more but a number. And with that, PageRank also becomes completely irrelevant.

DailyBlogTips has a list of some popular sites/blogs that got penalized:

Popular blogs that recently lost PR:

• Engadget (from 7 to 5)
• AutoBlog (from 6 to 4)
• Problogger (from 6 to 4)
• Copyblogger (from 6 to 4)
• Search Engine Journal (from 7 to 4)
• Quick Online Tips (from 6 to 3)
• Search Engine Roundtable (from 7 to 4)
• Blog Herald (from 6 to 4)
• Weblog Tools Collection (from 6 to 4)
• JohnTP (from 6 to 4)
• Coolest Gadgets (from 5 to 3)

Mainstream websites that were selling links and were also penalized:

• Washington Post (from 7 to 5)
• Washington Times (from 6 to 4)
• Charlotte Observer (from 6 to 4)
• Forbes.com (from 7 to 5)
• SFGate.com (from 7 to 5)
• Sun Times (from 7 to 5)
• New Scientist (from 7 to 5)
• Seattle Times (from 6 to 4)

You can also check out Andy Beard’s list here.

Amidst all the penalties being thrown, there’s one blog that actually got an increase in PR after the last update. AdesBlog jumped from a PR 5 to a PR 7.

In my case, I didn’t even know that Google already did the PR update. I only knew about it while I was chatting with my friend Retz and he told me that Google PageRank was just updated and that his blog’s rank dropped. I immediately visited CheckPageRank and checked my blog’s PageRank and was relieved to find out that it remained at PR 5. I’m sure this will remain as a hot topic in the Internet, especially in the blogosphere and I’m sure everyone would like to know the answer or the reasons for the recent Google PR update results.

Have you checked your blog’s PageRank lately? Did your blog lose or gain ranking? What do you think about this recent development? Does this mean that PageRank is becoming irrelevant? Share your thoughts!

Upgrading to WordPress 2.2 was no sweat. Everything went smoothly and I didn’t encounter any problem whatsoever. The only thing I had to fix were some custom fields or parameters for a couple plugins that I used. Aside from upgrading my WordPress installation, I also installed and re-installed a few plugins.

1. Enforce .www Preference – I installed this plugin because I wanted to make sure that all queries and links to my blog point to only one URL which is http://jaypeeonline.net. If your site can be accessed with both http://domain.com and www.domain.com formats, most search engines treat them as two different domains therefore affecting your backlinks.

2. WP-Chunk – Once in a while, someone posts a comment and inserts a very long URL that overlaps the comment box and messes up the layout. This can be really annoying and with this plugin, you’ll no longer worry about those long URLs. WP-Chunk cuts off the long URL and displays a shorter version and you can also specify how many characters long for the displayed URL.

3. MyAvatars – I reinstalled this plugin after I noticed that my own gravatar wasn’t showing up. I could see other people’s gravatars except mine. I also activated the Gravatar support for this plugin.

Yesterday, John Chow made a post about the MyAvatars plugin being broken. He turned off the plugin after finding out that instead of avatars, the plugin displayed broken images. But not long after he published his entry, the plugin seem to be working again and the avatars were back. I guess the guys at MyBlogLog read John’s post and went to fix it right away.

4. LightBox 2.02 Plugin – I had this plugin when I installed the Lazy K Gallery plugin for my Photos page. A few weeks ago, I noticed that when I clicked on the images, they’re not displayed using Lightbox (Javascript-powered overlay popups). So I checked the plugin page and found a new version, LightBox 0.6.4 Beta. I replaced the one I had installed and after activating the plugin, I checked on my photos and this time it worked.

There’s one plugin I installed that I didn’t include in this list. I’ll feature it separately as a plugin review so watch out for it.