What's Your Point of View
Posted On: 2007-11-23
Have you ever stopped to wonder if you're actually looking at things from the right view point? I mean sometimes when something happens we see it as all bad but what if it really happens to be all good if only we take the time to look at it from a different perspective?
Yesterday I was reading a typical thanksgiving type article written by a search engine optimisation specialist who was talking about that dreaded green bar that Google has produced and that webmasters stress over. She wondered if all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that occurred recently when Google changed the page rank of so many sites was basically just a waste of time.
Her theory was that perhaps the change in page rank was actually a very good thing for webmasters and actually a signal that Google liked their pages even more. It's an interesting theory and one that is worth considering.
She suggested that perhaps this time Google didn't necessarily mark most pages down ... even though the page rank numbers did change for so many sites. Instead of marking pages down Google just changed the scale of the page rank bar and what was once a PR4 under the old scale now became a PR3 simply because Google changed the scale of the page rank bar and that PR3 page still had the 'value' of a PR4 page under the old scale.
To her way of thinking Google needs to change the scale of the page rank bar simply to accommodate the fact that websites are improving and eventually every older site on the Net would be a 10 ... and then page rank would be totally meaningless.
Well perhaps page rank is already meaningless but if it isn't then perhaps Google really does need to change the scale now and again. For those of us who are not among the chosen ones who have access to the inner sanctums of the Temple of Google any change in the page rank scale would appear terrifying yet to Googlites it would be perfectly understandable.
I experienced something similar last Sunday when a nurse had a little fiddle with some of the monitoring equipment that surrounded my relative when she was terribly ill in hospital. Suddenly it looked as though the occasional breaths that she appeared to be taking without the help of the ventilator had turned into short gasps and it worried me.
Steve on the other hand knew what she had done and reassured me that it was a good sign because we were now seeing a much more regular breathing pattern simply because the scale had been reduced.
So if you were one of those webmasters who went into a total flat spin when they suddenly realized that the page rank for their websites had dropped how do you feel now? Like most others you probably would have looked at it as something dreadful ... even terrifying as you could see the value of your site and the income you could generate from your site going down the drain.
But what if Google was only adjusting the scale and under the new scale, even though the number was smaller, the true 'value' assigned to your site by Google was actually the same or greater than before? All that running around and screaming that the end of the world was at hand would have been for nothing.
You could have saved yourself the angst, the sleepless nights and the worry that your empire was about to collapse around your ears. You could have got on with some value-producing work instead of wasting time increasing your blood pressure.
So maybe it is time to take a deep breath every time something happens and, before you go and jump off a cliff, you spend a few moments looking at whatever the situation is from an entirely different point of view. Instead of thinking of the glass as half empty think of it as being half full and you might find that a positive mental attitude is great way to overcome the challenges that everyone has to face from time to time.
Actually if you want to succeed in just about any business you'll need to develop a positive mental attitude. If you don't then those challenges that we all must face will become too difficult to overcome and eventually your business will fail.
And that's about it for this week ... I'm looking forward to a quiet and restful weekend. The forecast here is for thunderstorms and rain but there's bound to be some sunny breaks in there and that's when I plan on doing some serious walking on the beach and maybe even a little jet skiing.