Congrats on your win, and best of luck during the remainder of the tournament!

Jeanne

That’s exactly the way I look at it. After all, providing value to our readers is really what it’s all about.

Take care!
Jeanne

Yuwanda, thank you much and congrats on your win! As for meeting … perhaps, perhaps. Like with tennis, I take one point at a time. I need to relax and not start shaking in the boots again so soon!

Meryl: Appreciate your candid comment! It’s very reassuring!

John: Writer’s Notes had a PR 3 for about 1 month, back in October-November, 2007. After 9 months of blogging, I’d finally achieved Google PR, only to have it taken away during the Google PR fiasco that stripped so many blogs of their hard-won PR. The presumption is that the reason was sponsored reviews; but no one really knows for sure (except Google), because many blogs that didn’t write paid posts also lost PR. It was quite a disappointment, I can tell you!

My blog has been predicted to be PR 5-6, based on number of backlinks, but only Google knows what Google is doing. Much of my content shows up on the first or second page of Google search results, so I’m not quite sure what gives. One thing I’ve learned through all this is not to depend on Google for my sense of self-worth–or for an accurate measurement of my blog’s value!

I’ve just completed an assessment using the Website Grader blog grading tool, which measures a blog’s SEO strength and other variables, and came through with a 90%. And that was with an erroneous Technorati ranking which was twice what my ranking actually is. (The tool used 60,000+ instead of the correct 30,000-).

In case anyone else would like to try the tool, the URL is http://www.websitegrader.com/. It offers a great deal of helpful info about a blog’s strengths and weaknesses.

Thanks again!
Jeanne

For calculation purposes, I upgraded all PR Zero sites to PR1, so that it what you were rated at. I am sure if the Google PR system updated more frequently, you would have a real ranking and probably better than PR1. I’m sorry to hear that you did not secure your own domain. That can be a real problem moving forward. Thank you for competing and for being so nice about my commentary.

John provided excellent and honest analysis. Thank you, John.

Thanks for your kind words. I’ve worked hard over the past 14 months to build up to an average of 350 unique readers a day at Orble, and I’m not yet at the point where I’m ready to move on and leave all my hard work behind to start all over from scratch. Maybe someday. (I don’t even own the Writer’s Notes domain name–Orble does–and it’s just been renewed.) So, for the time being at least, Orble is where I’ll be staying. I simply have too much invested in Writer’s Notes to leave it all behind. I’ll just have to do my best to address the design issues that so seriously affected the outcome of this match.

Thanks again!
Jeanne

I do personally find the Orble site very frustrating though and I hope you manage to find a way to move on from it that will allow you and your blog to grow and flourish in the future.

Congratulations to the Content Maven for getting through this round.

Joanna