Slammed by the PageRank downgrade? 3 ideas to combat Google

With Google’s recent crackdown on paid links, some say in an attempt to increase their takings from the advertising pie, a number of blogs that rely on Google for search engine traffic have been hit hard. If your blog falls into this category, then your choices are as follows:

• Comply with Google – stop selling sponsored links + replace it with AdSense
• Make your blog less Google-dependent for traffic

If you’re leaning towards the latter, here are three ideas to help Google do less evil:

• Retain your audience by promoting your RSS feeds to them – people who subscribe will bypass the Google intermediary layer
• Use your blog as the sharing mechanism it’s designed to be – through comments on other peoples’ blogs, trackbacks, pings, social bookmarking and blog communities like mybloglog, twitter etc
• Get a good domain name that is generic enough that web users will naturally type-in the address e.g. realestate.com.au or podcast.com