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So it's the day before the start of the Easter break and after a crazy month or more I am so looking forward to a break.

For us it really is going to be a break because Steve and I are heading off first thing in the morning for a couple of days away ... from everything. Well ... almost everything ... we will have our laptops with us but I know that if Steve catches me doing anything that looks like work he's going to throw my laptop in the nearest swimming pool so I'll try not to work.

And when was the last time you took a break from all the work you've been doing? I know that the need to take a break is something I talk about frequently but it really is important because no one is going to take your place and put food on your table if you work so hard that you burn out.

So for this Easter weekend do try and step away from your computer for at least one day and get out and do something that's totally different to what you would normally do. It really is important for you to take a break if you want to go on making money here.

Anchor Text
So a day or two ago Google announced that it had tweaked the way it assessed anchor text and almost as soon as they had made that announcement people were frantically rushing to be the very first ones to say that anchor text ... as a ranking factor ... was dead.

Now if you have seen people saying that on their blogs I hope you didn't pay a lot of attention to them and I would suggest that you never visit that blog again because anyone who suggests that anchor text is dead ... based on their interpretation of what Google said ... is an idiot.

Sure Google said that they had tweaked the way they use anchor text to rank pages ... and there was even mention of that in the patents that I touched on in my last column here in March (and my first column for this month over on Porn Resource) ... but there was no indication that they were ditching anchor text entirely nor was there any mention that they were making a major downgrade in the way they handle anchor text.

But if you want to believe idiots then go ahead and be my guest ... there are lots of webmasters out there who will appreciate the boost they will get in the search engines if you stop using anchor text.

When faced with the possibility that Google has made some wholesale changes to the way it deals with an important linking factor prudent webmasters spend time looking around the web and actually doing some testing before they make any decisions that may have an impact on their rankings. They certainly don't pay a lot of attention to those who want to scream that the sky is falling.

Page Rank
Sometimes I can be as thick as two bricks and the light bulb doesn't come on till long after the world has moved on to other things ... and that's what happened yesterday.

If you have been in this business for a few years you will have been involved in all the kerfuffle that raged about Google's page rank. There was/is the page rank that we see via the green bar and there was/is the page rank that we don't see and getting good page rank has caused many sleepless nights for many webmasters as they worked to increase their page rank.

But what if page rank wasn't really page rank? Yes ... maybe I have been working too hard but what if real page rank was something that many of us missed entirely? PageRank ... the thing that set off our never-ending search for better page rank ... came from something developed by Larry Page and maybe that's his name in the title and not a reference to the pages on a website. What if the guys at Google just let us all think that it was about page rank?

Yes I know ... it's a crazy thought. Or maybe I'm just trying to mess with your minds ...

And that's it for me today ... just a few more hours and the weekend will be upon us and I can hardly wait. But before it comes I've only got 500 images to re-number and a client who needs to be convinced that he can't expect to rank above his competitors with a site that only went live yesterday and has absolutely zero back links and text that he insisted on writing himself ... sigh.