Almost a decade ago (which makes me feel old just typing it), Google PageRank was everything.

You wanted to have PageRank if you wanted to monetize your blog, let alone be taken seriously in search engine results. With a bit of work it wasn’t very hard at all to get something like a two straight out of the gate. But in recent years, it has seemed more difficult to actually get that coveted PageRank… and then, not too long ago when I ran a PageRank checker on my own blog and other blogs and sites that were known to have it, suddenly they were all gone. This has left many people scratching their heads trying to figure out what the best metric to measure website popularity (“importance”) was, or should be, especially since Google hasn’t really… said much on the whole matter. I mean, I run Google Analytics behind this blog, but it’s mainly to let me know if two very specific people (Bub’s paternal grandmother and his great-aunt) ever actually access this blog, that way I can go to all of the trouble of IP blocking them and do it as many times as becomes necessary until they get the point. Aside from that, I don’t really mind how many hits it gets…

Although it could have done with improvement, if PageRank is gone that’s sad (and the end of an era).

I’ve been reading about any new metrics that the behemoth known as Google PageRank could be using, or has been using, in the hopes that I can raise this blog’s PageRank for future endeavors (even though, apparently, a sign that it might have started to be noticed by Google is an influx of spam comments… and, I mean, I do get those). It honestly seems like blogs in general, particularly self-hosted blogs, are not quite as popular as they used to be maybe even ten years ago, even though I didn’t feel like I could actually write anything of substance in a public blog due to the fact that members of Bub’s paternal family were actually cyberstalking me online. So far, I continue to monitor the Google Analytics that is embedded in this blog to ensure that hits from two very specific locations do not come up. If they do, I will go through my view history to find the IP of those hits, block them by 403, and continue to block any subsequent hits to those locations for as long as it takes until the message that I am attempting to send becomes clear. It might already have become clear now that they know that I am running an internal tracker behind all websites that I use (or that I did), or the fact that the state would not actively pursue child support in Bub’s case citing safety reasons that stemmed from his paternal grandmother for the longest time until those safety issues had to shift to his father and his paternal grandparents. As stated, I may address those… issues in a password-protected post.

It still boggles me that I can’t, at least, easily get a PageRank of one just by writing here as much as I do.