Comments on: Google Page Rank 0

By: Aqif

Aqif — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:25:36 +0000

Paul, it doesn’t matter what is your page rank. But your content does matter.

I believe your readers (including me) are still with you event though your page rank dropped (I also experienced it).

So just produce a quality content and the readers will follow.

Good luck in everything you do Paul

By: Paul Piotrowski

Paul Piotrowski — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:34:14 +0000

@Ross: I actually just made a change to that Cloaking plugin last week and I asked Google for a reassessment of my site. My traffic has already increased, but I’m still waiting to see if my PR goes up.

If it does, I’ll write a quick post detailing the change I made to the plugin. I don’t think Google has a problem with the cloaking. THe “Cloaking” they’re talking about in their T&C is when you create pages that are different for Search Engines than for users. What this plugin does is “link cloaking” and Google frowns upon “page cloaking”. The problem with that plugin is actually that it doesn’t add a “rel=’nofollow’” at the end of your links. I think that’s why I lost my PR.

By: Ross

Ross — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:52:30 +0000

Hi Paul,
I had the exact same thing happen on one of my blogs a few mths back, was unsure why. I was using TLA at the time, and knew it could be an issue, but also (after reading terms & conditions of google) found that they hate any kind of cloaked links. I believe this extends to any type of plugin that allows you to see a different URL for a link than where you eventually end up.

SO, I ditched TLA, and ditched my link cloaking plugin (ie, the links in your sidebar under “Money Making Resources”, with links such as http://www.inspiredmoneymaker.com/go/yada_yada etc – fired off an email to google apologising for my ignorance and explaining what I’d done to correct the site (which was only those two things – ditching TLA and removing all cloaked links) and google reinstated me from PR0 back to PR3 within 2wks.

By the way, I now have pretty ugly affiliate links (ie, http://www.clickbank.com/examplelink#984980984 etc, and also add rel=nofollow to all aff links) but then again I get a lot of traffic from google, so it’s good to have a bit of googly love

Anyway, good luck! I believe you can have paid links on your site as long as they’re listed under ‘sponsors’ etc and you use ‘nofollow’.

By: m.dinesh

m.dinesh — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 16:02:31 +0000

I even heard that google really hates paid links on our blogs.
For example johnchow dropped 3 places in his page rank.

By: ketyung

ketyung — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:56:38 +0000

Yeah, Latest G Pagerank update, shows Johnchow.com now back to PR3 … I hope this is just temporary fluctuation of pageranks.. Even some of mine internal pages (especially the categories), used to be PR4 and now dropped to PR4. But some internal pages from PR0 or NO PR shot up to PR3 and PR4

By: Paul Piotrowski

Paul Piotrowski — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:09:52 +0000

@Elijah: It’s funny… Last year I bought a 5.5 acre property which is mostly trees with about 1.5 acres cleared where my house is. I ended up having to buy a John Deere tractor for some landscaping I needed to do and to cut the grass.

When I was cutting the grass last weekend using the tractor I ran over a heavy plastic bag which used to have rock salt in it. The twin mower on the tractor sucked the bag into the blades, and the tractor is so powerful that it just shredded the bag into a thousand pieces and spat it out the side in a big POOF.

Right after that happened I had this thought. What if I did a video where I made something like out of cardboard or plastic which represented Google and it’s stupid PageRank 0 icon, and then just to show them how much I like them right now what if I ran over it on my tractor and watched it get shredded and come POOFing out the side.

I could even wear my farmer bill straw hat with a superman logo I bought as a joke when I got the tractor. I think if I put that on YouTube I might get more traffic to my site than I ever did from Organic Google.

By: Paul Piotrowski

Paul Piotrowski — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:48:20 +0000

@ketyung: He still has TLA links and some of them are questionably related. However, now that I think about it, a PR6 drop down to PR3 is HUGE compared to PR3 to PR0 since the algorithm is logarithmic. Anyway, I removed TLA from my site so hopefully I see a recovery.

By: ketyung

ketyung — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:46:29 +0000

Didn’t you know that JohnChow.com was at pagarank 6 and then penalized to 3 and now has come back to 4 again, which I guess he’s removed or reduced his TLA links…

By: Elijah

Elijah — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:21:30 +0000

Man, I am so sick of Google and their slaps. It’s a complete monopoly and sad to say but unless you ranking well in the big G, you’re not ranking at all, right? Wrong. I’m a firm believer in the little-big guys, and I have had great success with certain campaigns focusing on the KEI of MSN and Yahoo rather than going straight to the “G” column and filtering out largest to smallest by KEI.

Somebody needs to slap Google.

By: Paul Piotrowski

Paul Piotrowski — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:35:52 +0000

@Joy: Hi Joy, Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm created by Larry Page of Google. Wikipedia shows the basics of what it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Essentially, it used to be a way that Google measured the popularity of a website on a scale of 0 to 9 based on how many people link to a site. Sometimes for reasons mostly unknown Google will take a site’s PageRank and drop it from whatever number it’s at (3 or 4 or 5 or whatever) down to 0 all of a sudden.

That’s essentially what happened to me, and it’s happened to many other Bloggers as well. This Blog post discusses some of the theories of why it happens.