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I started playing around with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Mansmith and Fielders, Inc. Since this was experimental, I didn’t charge much because I needed to prove my concepts first if they worked. And being an experimental deal, I was also not given the obligation to monitor and give the client ranking reports and stuff like that. Having this as the first site I played SEO with, I haven’t updated it in quite a while with the new techniques I have learned over time. It had number a 1 ranking on a 3 keyword phrase “marketing training Philippines” and “sales training Philippines” arranged in any order for those words for more than a year in Google, Yahoo and MSN and serverd as my example I had for selling SEO officially to clients that has pleased them well. When I started getting SEO clients, I started doing SEO better, and I totally forgot about maintaining the Mansmith and Fielders Marketing and Sales Training Specialist website on fixing up their SEO since I was not required to by the client. By late November, while showing to a colleague in the web business the power of SEO and searched for the keywords “marketing training philippines,” the Mansmith and Fielders website went to page 3 on Google and was for a very long time number 1, it went down for some reason to page 3! Wondering what happened, and checked it again the next day, it went down to page 15! From number 1 to page 15! That is real bad, and I started asking some SEO friends how were their websites. Is there some certain news on a change in algorithm by Google. I decided to check out another SEO client of mine that time, a Termite treatment company targetting Ventura county in California as their target market, Martal Exterminators and their ranking just went down a few spots but still on the first page for geographic location and service keyword search. So I thought, maybe it is because I haven’t fixed the Mansmith and Fielders website for quite some time. I just kept Mansmith and Fielders website as how it is and I assumed I already knew the problem. Since all title tags and metas were all the same on every page since I was just playing around with SEO that time and not being an official SEO client, I did not have to waste time fixing it. I also noticed the change in Yahoo as it’s ranking also started to plunge down, but as usual, on MSN, it was still the number 1 spot.

And just today, I decided to install the Google PageRank plugin on Mozilla Firefox (Yes, mine works on Firefox version 1.5) to display the rank in the browser’s status bar. I checked out Martal Exterminators and the PageRank was 2, but was surprised since it was still doing so well in SEO. And I was surprised also when I tried out Mansmith and Fielders and got a PageRank 4. I then checked the ranking again on Mansmith and Fielders and it went back up to number 3 for “marketing training Philippines” and number 2 for “sales training Philippines” and I did not even do a thing to the site. There was also a major improvement in Yahoo and the Mansmith and Fielders page just rose back to page 1 in all the big 3 search engines. I was surprised because it went down to page 15 for about 2 months and now it is back to page 1 without me editing anything. I then checked Martal Exterminators for any change and I bared noticed any change. It is still ranked pretty good, and the Google PageRank is 2. And this site is even doing better than my own company website which you can barely search for when searching for my services (but I haven’t optimized my site, I haven’t even finished the content) but my own website has a PageRank of 4.

I got a PageRank 2 website and a PageRank 4 website and both websites are doing good. My own company website offering web hosting, domain registration, web design, web development and SEO has a PageRank 4, and yet it is not performing well. But I know this still needs to be worked out on. But what is my point? Having a higher PageRank does not right away mean your website will do better. And the same is true with all other SEO concepts. Having more inbound links does not mean you get a higher ranking right away. Having cleaner code, also does not mean you get higher ranking right away. And I have been hearing all these so called SEO experts which I refuse to call myself one, that concentrate only on one area, but it does not really work that way. I guess the proper way to say it is with the phrase, “assuming all other things equal.” PageRank will make a difference in ranking between websites assuming all other things are equal. But more often than not, other things are never equal. But for me, PageRank still matters, along with other SEO stuff we do and not on PageRank alone. Am I 100% correct? Answer is, I don’t know, this is just my opinion.