Yeah, I knew something was going on. My traffic has spiked 50% with search results comprising all of the gain and covering up a bit of tail-off in non-search engine traffic.

Because I’m so entwined–gmail, etc.–they have one or two more chances before I disentangle, but they’re on the road to it.

I’m in the same boat, Anwyn. Gmail. Google Calendar. SMS all the time to find addresses and phone numbers when I’m on the go. Google analytics & Adsense on all of my blogs.

I’ll be spending a LOT of time this weekend finding replacements for all of those, if the current status doesn’t get corrected.

You already know how I feel, but I’m not terribly embroiled with Google. I, however, will not use them to search again.

Trouble is, most of the world isn’t paying attention. Google is a verb. Yahoo is not. Well, not in the search-engine sense anyway.

Tell us what you get in retail therapy. They do sell naps, don’t they?

I bought shoes. Glorious shoes. Also, candy. And wine. Fortunately, I still have the shoes.

You know what pisses me off most about Google? They show that EV has 3,510 incoming whereas Yahoo shows 70,902 incoming links, and AltaVista shows a whopping 251,000.

But here’s the kicker: my Google backlinks are well over double what several other PR5 blogs show. (I know, I’ve checked.)

So Google is definitely discounting some incoming links, and possibly penalizing EV. Why? Well, perhaps it’s the links in the right sidebar, which compete with Google Adsense.

Thing is, I have YET to earn one single check from Google in 4+ years of running Adsense. If they were in the least bit profitable for smaller bloggers, I’d ditch the others. But they’re not.

Unfortunately, they ARE still the paradigm by which a blog’s “importance” is judged.

And. That. Pisses. Me. Off.

I stopped doing paid blogging, so I am blissfully a) unaware b) uncaring about all this. Glad you got some shoes in the process, though.

Kate, do you use Webmaster Central? I know we all hate Google right now, but just so you’re aware…they won’t show you your accurate inlink numbers with the link: command or any other tools. You have to verify your site with them through WC and then you’ll see more accurate data. I don’t want to slow the Google bash at all, but I wanted to make sure you knew that.

Shoes, huh? They’re like heroin for women. Yvette’s closet is stacked deep…it boggles my mind. I think I’ve maybe got 10 pairs at the most.

I do use it, Matt. It shows the same number.

Well, there’s that! Let me ask you, did those numbers drop in the past day or two, as well? I’d be very interested to know if there’s a correlation between the PR spank and a drop in backlinks.

Oh, HELL. I take that back. I was looking in the wrong place. There are 80,039 incoming links to Electric Venom.

This just pisses me off even more.

Where’s my martini?!

Damn! I was hoping I had stumbled on to something VERY juicy. I would’ve loved nothing more than to go on a tear about that…

Well, there’s always the “juicy” aspect of having double the incoming links that some PR5 sites do but being rated a PR3 now.

Apparently there’s some changes afoot with the PageRank algorithm. Venomous Kate isquite displeased. Maybe I’m simply too marginal in the scheme of things online, but I find it very hard to care about this. Google tinkers with PageRank every now and again to attempt to filter out people that are gaming the system; if they go overboard, well, they’re

She isa little ticked off

My rank pagesVenomous Kate has had it up to here with Google:

so I jumped at the chance to prove him wrong. (I’m just that way.) That’s when I launched CM and QOS. After signing up to do reviews with one company, I was making over $1800 per month. Then paid bloggersgot spanked, and even though I made light of it (and another $250), my income took a dive. (Aside: I have to confess there’s a small part of me which revels in the fact that they got spanked on their stock prices since then, too. They