Page Rank and Paid Posting
It didn't take much research to find why my page rank dropped. It is because of the paid content on my blog. I do remember reading a few months back about blogs that were taking page rank hits because Google changed the algorithm to penalize blogs with paid links. This was around the time when my rank dropped from a 4 to a 3. I figured a drop of one was no big deal, and there were still plenty of PPP opportunities, so who cares. Well a drop to 0 doesn't leave me feeling so blase.
Like I said yesterday page rank doesn't mean that much to me. If Google wants thinks I don't have a quality blog because I do paid links that is their choice. I know paid blogging is sometimes controversial, but earning money is a big part of why I started this blog. So let Google rank pages how they like. Problem is PPP advertisers still want to use page rank to determine a blog's quality.
IZEA (parent of PPP) has developed what they call Real Rank as an alternative to page rank. From waht I could gather at the forum boards, PPP wants to phase out page rank, but the advertisers are still demanding that it be used. Hello. If I advertise for you, my page rank will drop, so what does the page rank mean? Can we follow the logic here?
Some, like Court's Internet Marketing School, say that Real Rank won't solve the problem, but just may push Google to stop indexing blogs with paid links. That I care about. If I'm not indexed then Stop the Ride will not show up in Google searches. That means less traffic. Not a good scenario.
So what to do? I'm not sure. I can go on as is and wait to see what happens. As long as PPP is still using page rank as criteria for opportunities, I will have little available there. I can look for alternative ways to generate income from the blog. I have seen mentioned selling links with no follow tags. That would be an option, but I'm not sure how to get that started. I'm going to have to think about this!
10 comments:
Well that explains why my visitors dropped dramatically after I put the Amazon list in my sidebar, I had no clue. I'll just remove mine since it's not much of a money maker for me.
Thanks for the info!
Magpie,
From my understanding ads in your sidebar shouldn't have any affect on your page rank. It is the in text links in your content that Google doesn't like.
And for now even those shouldn't affect your traffic just your page rank. The fear is that Google will stop including paid bloggers in the search engine.
Sorry about your drop, but I don't think the Amazon ad would cause that.
I noticed that my PageRank dropped dramatically too. I wonder how long that takes to "wear off"? I don't do PPP, but I do include PayU2Blog links
I imagine getting advertisers to understand "Real Rank" and "Page Rank" is kinda like getting a bunch of letter writers to understand a yahoo group. cough.. *co-op* cough.. LOL It'll work itself out eventually I guess but it sure doesn't make a lot of sense now!
Bummer, must have been coincidence. Guess I just need to be more interesting :-)
Thanks!
Another thing to consider. My understanding is that content only counts towards your page rank for 365 days. So once a post is 366 days old, inbound/outbound links etc don't count anymore. So if you have really good articles that helped to bump up your page rank-after 365 days it may be worth reposting them as a "best of" type thing so that they still count.
course I can't find where I read that now. .
Joanna,
The article I linked to has a link to a post where she talks about how she got her page rank back. (did you follow all that?)
Crystal,
well um yes, wish more co-opers would use the yahoo group!
Magpie,
Didn't mean to imply that! :)
Jenn,
That makes sense to me. Though I've also been told that duplicate content is frowned on by the google bots. It was recommended to me that I rework posts changing at least 10% of the content. The situation was different because I was using ideas I've shared here on another website I write for. I wonder how it applies within the same blog or when you are duplicating something over a year old?
Wow! I am just really shocked to hear this! I am disappointed for you because I know how hard you work. I had never heard this before- thanks for keeping us informed.
I have to tell you that although I love your blog- I mostly skip past the paid for posts. You do a good job and I understand the need to make money- I just prefer the other stuff.
Jenny,
I do appreciate your honest input. I'm not sure where I'm going from here as far as the income, but I do have a few ideas brewing.
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