I could not help but notice the latest Google PageRank smackdown has really been on a larger scale than I thought. It appears almost every blog that was doing paid or sponsored reviews suffered drastic drops in their PageRank; a dropdown to zero in most cases.
If previous estimates were anything to go by, perhaps as many as 20% of all blogs online suffered PR knockdowns. That’s a whopping number of blogs indeed. I’d imagine Google’s “reconsideration box” in Webmaster Tools would now probably be filled with “PageRank reconsideration requests” stretching miles long.
If you’re one of the thousands that got hit, you have basically 3 choices:
- Admit your wrongdoing, reappeal to Google, and basically, hope for the best
- Get a new domain and start afresh
- Carry on like before
I would suggest doing the 1st, if your blog and domain is old, and you have thousands of links. Maybe you have spent a lot of time, money and effort on your blog, and you have sentimental feelings for it. In this case, it’s better to keep your site, than to start a new one afresh. There is the site age factor in it, which a lot of people forget.
If your site wasn’t having a high PageRank in the first place, and you never really cared about it, go ahead and ditch it. I don’t really recommend this course of action, since good domains are hard to come by these days, and spammers have already used and abused many domains to the point that many “new” domains which you thought were fresh, have already been banned by Google, and will have a tough time getting indexed in the first place.
As for the third option, I sincerely wish you all the best. But unless you are John Chow, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to trade your PageRank and (possibly your future traffic) just for the sake of a few dollars, and getting on Mr Gs toes.
So, for those planning to submit a Reconsideration Request to Google, here are some general tips for submitting a Reconsideration Request to Google via Google’s Webmaster Tools:
- Be nice, and play nice. If you play hard ball with Google, and try to argue, you’ll stand a lesser chance of being pardoned….;)
- Be transparent with details. The guy at the end could easily do a search on you, and find a whole lot of info on your sites, browsing habits and so forth. Even how much you used to make selling sponsored reviews….yikes, (frightening what Google knows about you).
- Tell Google what you’re going to do in future. Of course, if you say you might do paid reviews again, you are not going to get a positive response….
- Don’t bug them everyday, if you don’t see anything happening to your PageRank. In the course of a month, you could try appealing a few times, but anything over that could annoy a Google employee to death…. 😉
- If you have already fixed up your site, you should proceed to manually resubmit new sitemaps from within the Webmaster Tools area. Manual submissions of sitemaps on their own are also helpful in most situations, and not just when you need a Google pardon.
These might seem like simple steps, but that’s what I did when I managed to get Google to respond positively (within several weeks) to a Reconsideration Request I had submitted (regarding a domain I owned, which was banned from Google due to the previous owners actions). As a general rule of thumb, we should never forget there is always a real human being at the other end; webmasters so wrapped up in “metrics, stats, and hits,” tend to forget this.
Some bloggers have announced quitting paid reviews, among them 5xmom.
Are paid or sponsored posting still viable as a means of income for bloggers?
As for those who still argue that PageRank is worthless since their deranked blog traffic levels are still the same, you’d need to take this into account: What if Google one day decides to pull the plug on your search engine traffic, arguing that your PageRank doesn’t warrant it? I would think it’s not difficult for Google to input algorithm changes that give more weight to PageRank, which would then affect search engine listings. PageRank belongs to Google, and they can do anything they want with it.
I’ve looked at the paid review model from several angles, and I don’t think it will work for most small bloggers, now that most of their PageRanks became zero, making them unattractive to advertisers. Ultimately, the paid review model would need to either drastically change concept, or (go under). As much I hate saying this…
P.S: Some blogs like QuickOnlineTips have proven that you can get back your Page Rank, so that’s one reason to keep your hopes up. That is, if you value your PageRank after all.