How I dealt with a Google Page Rank drop at How I Save Money
On December 11th, 2007 I got an email from a sponsor saying that they required at least a Google page rank of 2 and because of the rating of my blog I no longer qualified for their services.
This threw me for a little bit because I knew that my blog was ranked at a 3 in the last two weeks. It was previously a 4 and then dropped one point when Google did the round of drops that everyone was talking about.
Most people said the drops were because of blogs having paid links on their pages. Since I dropped one point I thought this was all that was going to happen so I did not bother with it.
I got a Shock
Then I get this email and I went over to check on the page rank and I saw that How I Save Money was indeed ranked at a 0. I did not panic because I remembered that ProBlogger had mentioned this in a post earlier in the year. I went over to ProBlogger and found this post that gave his opinions on what to do in order to regain your page rank .
The post also talks about losing traffic but my traffic was not affected in this case. I decided to take Darren’s advice and
Do not panic
Do not make major changes
Wait
Do not panic
I did not panic. I had already sold the links that I sold and I was not going to refund the money and lose the links because that did not guarantee that I would instantly gain my page rank back.
Although I was a bit annoyed I tried to stay calm and decided to Google (ironically) the reasons for the page rank drop. I found a few reasons that people were speculating on and decided to work on those items one at a a time.
Do not make Major Changes
I did not make major to the blog. Most of the affected blogs immediately took off all of their sponsored links and deleted any of the content that referred to those links.
I decided to do some investigations and after consulting with 3HN Designs I found out that you could simply add a ‘no follow’ tag to your blog code and this would satisfy some of Google’s requirements.
I got Baz to put in the no follow tags for me and I was set.
The next thing I decided to do was to make sure my pages were being submitted to the major directories and all of my updates were being pinged out to the world. I also decided to keep up a steady posting schedule to make sure that I had fresh content when the Google spiders crawled my site . The more fresh content they find each time they crawl, the more likely they are to crawl more often.
I also decided to check out some other types of rankings like Compete and Alexa just to see how those were doing. They both gave tips on what to do to increase your page rank under their system and I easily applied some of those changes.
I linked out to other blogs more and one of the most important things I did was to leave a post URL as my comment URL if I was commenting on a topic on someone’s blog. For this to work the URL I was leaving had to be on the same topic as the post the person wrote. If I was commenting on someone’s Top 10 Ways to Save Money, then I would leave my URL as http://www.howisavemoney.net/save-money/25-ways-i-save-money-the-full-list/ instead of just leaving the link to the home page.
Wait
I decided to wait to see what was happening all over the internet and watch what other people were doing. Most people said to just ignore it and in a few months the page ranks would be updated.
Well on April 28th, 2008 I got a page rank update and moved back up to a 2 from a 0. Now while this was not as high as what I previously had, I was happy to not have a zero ranking any more.
How did you deal with a page rank drop if you did get one? What did your rank go back up to after the reinstatement?
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- The page rank 10 project.
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- Thank you Jagular!
Unfortunately, Page Rank has gone the way of Alexa, Technorati, etc… all useless now
Hi Shawn,
While it may be useless to us as bloggers there are still some sponsors who look at PageRank when making decisions that affect our relationships with them.
So while it is not the be all and end all for me…it is still something I have to consider because other people think it is still important.
I totally agree… I’ve also had sponsors who use only Alexa to determine if they will send me review items… which is totally silly. I miss the days where people would look at your site as a whole, your traffic, your readers… not just a silly number… oh wait, that sounds just like a FICO score! hehehe
Great post, Lulu, I am going to work on some of these things this month for my site. It appears even though some traffic sites treat my sub-domains as separate sites, Google treats them the same so I started the nofollow on my paid post but still have to do some more work, it’s time for some June cleaning.
Hey Mark …again don’t worry about it too much. I used to stress and agonize over my page rank and while it is still important it should not determine how you think of your site.
I am quite proud of myself that I contribute to my site and I have people (like you) who come over and read it and (sometimes) find something useful on it.
Thanks for giving information.