Apr 29
My PageRank is Back!
Unbelievably, only days after submitting a reinclusion request to Google, I rechecked my PageRank and am showing a healthy PR of 3! Honestly, I don’t know if this is going to mean much for my site and blog monetization going forward, but it was on my list of things to take care of “now that I’m back”, and I’m very happy it’s all done.
If you’re in the same place I was in, feel free to check out this post from Matt Cutts: and it wouldn’t hurt to also look at this one from the always supportive Andy Beard! Oh, and in the event that you DON’T want to read those posts, here’s the summary on how to remedy this problem:
- Remove yourself from paid links on your site.
- Take down your paid links or nofollow them.
- Think about removing those paid link pages entirely.
- Think about removing the code on your site linking to paid link companies.
- Go to the Dashboard in Google Sitemaps and click the link on the right that reads, “Request Reinclusion”.
- Tell Google you’re sorry, what you did, what you did to fix it, and why it will never happen again.
- Give me a high five.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Hey Bush! I’ve had all kinds of wild fluctuations with page rank: 4 to three to four to two and now they give me a 0. I’ve never had paid links of any kind and I doubt a reinclusion request actually does anything. I know of many sites in the top 10,000 on Alexa having a PR6 that were kicked down to zero. Basically, in my case, it’ll come back up. Regardless of page rank, I consistently have 48 individual articles on page one google search results for some unique phrases (google “casino bartending” and I’m number one over dozens of sites with much higher page rank) and actual page rank has never once altered my standing in searches. Congrats on getting a rank! I personally think page rank is just something to cry about when you don’t have any LOL! I haven’t checked mine in a year until I saw this post in my feed reader and found myself with a zero. I’m so concerned, I shall refrain from checking it until next year
April 30th, 2009 at 10:48 am
HIGH FIVE !
I didn’t need a page rank increase, I just can’t resist a high five. 8- )
Good post though, and glad your rank is back !
May 1st, 2009 at 7:46 am
@Bobby – HA HA HA Now that kind of comment is what I’ve been missing lately! Yeah, PageRank and Alexa are funny things. Some people hang their hat on them and when you look at the most popular sites on the web, do you think they care one lick about them?
I guess for me, I look at these things as total package items… If I go out and end up looking for advertisers again, they tend to care more about those things than others. Regardless, I’m just happy that my site is really looking the best it has in a long time. Both in content and actual appearance. (#):)
May 1st, 2009 at 7:48 am
@DX -Thanks man, much appreciated. (#):)
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:05 am
Congratulations Bush! Now you’ve recovered your page rank. Google search bot definitely acts fast nowadays. Google is getting increasingly harsher towards pain content because it don’t want them to clutter their search results – which is a good thing for googlers like us but also bad for people who once had paid postings on their blog before. You’ve done the right thing to remove them
p/s: Some of the Wordpress SEO plugins may cause Google to demote your pagerank, especially when keywords are repeated over and over again on the same page.
May 2nd, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Bobby I can assure you I have pretty conclusive data that a paid links penalty can affect the passing of pagerank, and possibly anchor text and other factors, not just externally, but also internally.
External passing of juice might not matter to many, but it can have a massive effect on a site’s internal structure.
Internal pages are the ones from which you can determine both anchor text, and how much juice the links past based on the number of links on the page. Google can actually apply a penalty on a page by page basis.
May 3rd, 2009 at 5:00 pm
@teddY – Yeah man, GBot is fast but I thought this kind of stuff was handled by actual PEOPLE over at Google which is why I was so surprised that things turned around so fast. And thanks for the heads up on the SEO plugins though those sound very black hatish which I would HOPE at this point I could notice. (#):)
@Andy – Thanks for the follow up and it’s funny you mention that since I just read something that brought internal links and internal link structure to mind.
August 2nd, 2009 at 9:25 am
Page rank. page rank. page rank. No conversation makes me feel more like a veteran, a tired veteran. I’ve been 7 on some of my big sites. One of my favorite blogs that I’ve kept up for years suddenly moved from 4 to zero and I never really figure out why. No paid links, no links to anything spammy. I eventually concluded that it was due to one of two things:
1. Domain parking. I had written a series of articles over six months comparing domain parking services (godaddy, trafficclub, and somebody else that I’ve now forgotten) rotating the domains each month to see who did the best job of monetizing parked domains. I actually listed the domains including links. This might have been interpreted as linking to MFAs.
2. I did some honest reporting on my efforts to monetized some sites including reporting some revenue numbers. Later, someone pointed out to me the fine print of the adsense deal which STRICTLY FORBIDS open discussion of adsense numbers. WOOOOPs.
Any opinion on which of these might have made my PR tank?
August 2nd, 2009 at 9:27 am
I’m back. Just in case that last post wasn’t long enough, I just remembered another interesting (to me at least) point about page rank. SEOers have for years debated as to whether the little green PR rank is worse than useless or not. But, as plain as the nose on my face, is the fact that it’s extremely useful as a way for big G to signal to people that you have done something wrong. This gets our attention. And, they can change the visible (but otherwise meaningless) PR indicator without taking the harsher measure of actually nuking your site in their rankings.
thoughts?