Have You Reclaimed Your PageRank Yet?

Last Fall, many bloggers became victims of a Google slap. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened and it most likely won’t be the last. When it happened just prior to the Summer of 2006 I wasn’t yet part of the blogosphere so when my pagerank went from a respectable 3 to a shocking 0 overnight I panicked. A quick search revealed that I was one of the many affected by the slap.

It soon became clear that the reason for the slap was advertisements that included links passing pagerank. At the time, there were a lot of articles written regarding the slap, ranging from a letter of “surrender” from the brilliant and hilarious Jennifer Laycock and Robert Clough from Search Engine Guide to a very thorough explanation of the reasons for the Google slap from Courtney Tuttle.

I read these articles and tried to remedy the situation by removing TNX ads and adding a few nofollows. I then sent a reconsideration message to Google. This was in November and nothing changed. At that point, I sort of gave up on it because so many people were all anti-Google anyway.
A couple of weeks ago, however, I was catching up on some feeds from awhile back and I came across an article from Yaro Starak called How I Got My Pagerank Back. Yaro mentioned that he was sure he hadn’t been liberal enough with his nofollow tags. He gives a great background of the slap and other articles that explain it so if I’m losing you, here, just read his article first.

I read that and I thought about all the sponsored posting I did last year and the random linking to different programs. I knew it would be a pain to go through everything and add nofollows, but if it was working, it would be totally worth it. It took me nearly half of a Saturday (If you have a 9 to 5 like me, then you know how precious weekend worktime) to do it, but by the time I sent my reconsideration request I was confident I had caught everything.

A little over a week later when I checked Pajama Professional’s pagerank it was back at three. Boy, was it nice to see that number up there instead of that depressing zero. If you were slapped last year and gave up, try again. Read Yaro’s article, go through your blog with a fine-toothed comb and reclaim your deserved rank!