Webmasters and SEO companies have been hammering on about Google’s PageRank for years now, which is no surprise when Google’s own toolbar has been teasing us all with it for so long. However, anyone who has created a website in the last six months or so will have noticed that they still have a PageRank of zero or not available. So what are we to do now that we’ve been set adrift in a gradeless society?

Well, first of all, make no mistake – our websites are still being graded, but things have moved on, again. In the very early days SEO was all about link exchanges, with anyone, anywhere, in any niche. Then things moved on so webmasters sought only relevant links from sites in the same, or similar, niches. Then things moved on again when Google allegedly started penalizing link swapping, so the idea of one-way links, three-way links and all manner of ludicrous attempts to affect the system rose to the surface, with ‘experts’ from New England to New Delhi promising to send your website rocketing to the stratosphere. Of course it was all nonsense, always has been and still is. But these services relied on the newbie who, not knowing any better, would believe that spending a few hundred would get their site special treatment.

At this point selling text links was big business, with many websites making thousands every month just from the sale of text links alone. For a while it worked, search results were skewed so that some really awful websites were at the top, simply because they’d bought the right text links. Of course it couldn’t last. The bottom fell out of this when Google announced it would penalize sites suspected of selling links. They did this by reducing their PageRank to zero, or much lower than it was, so that no one would want to buy links from them in the first place.

Nothing too radical had changed after that until now, where it seems Google may be thinking of ditching toolbar PageRank altogether.

So, ‘what are we to do now?’ cry the SEOs and webmasters. The sensible among us and Google bosses would reply, ‘the same as always, you fools, build websites people want to visit’. It’s not that hard really, unless you’re a work-shy fop who’d rather copy other people’s work and use spinning software to try and Google fool make content as fresh like born inside text.

All Google and website users want is a clean, honest browsing experience. So here are some of the things Google will be treating as less important, things that will be of lesser consideration when ranking your websites. They will have some effect. Obviously you may get direct visitors, but their effect on search results will be minimized:

• Blog commenting
• Forum posting
• Social Bookmarking
• Article Submission
• Bulk Directory Submission
• Mass Link Exchange

Of course, some of the above have been reduced in importance for some time now, and some of these things can still have benefits if done properly. Bad examples of blog comments and forum posting for instance are: ‘Hey, great site’, ‘Very informative, love it’ and any other generic terms – especially if you paid some idiot to post the exact same comments on a thousand different blogs and forums.

Social bookmarking can work to get some visitors, but it’s very difficult to do this without being spammy.

Article submissions can work if you’re writing high quality material and sending it to a single, very specific and high quality destination. Like a science article to a respected science resource. However, the days of submitting your article to large directories over and over and getting positive results are on their way out the door.

Bulk directory submissions and link exchanges. Well, what can I say – you may as well set fire to your computer right now and forget all about making it online.

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still things you can do:

• Guest Blogging in quality, respected blogs – people will respect your work and click through to your website, and tell others about it.
• Link Baiting – this is all about making sure your site has the right content, pages people are looking for, and making sure yours is better than the others.
• Press Releases – good for business websites if done correctly for the right audience
• Working with Social Communities – building a Facebook page, for example, and a large fan base circumvents Google and search engines entirely, creating a whole new source of traffic.