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I just wanted to make a quick post announcing that I have reached two of my blog’s biggest milestones. My blog is now one of the top 10,000 blogs in the world according to Technorati. Being that there is well over 112,000,000 blogs on Technorati right now, having my blog be in the top 10,000 puts me in the VERY top percentile of blogs.
My blog has also just surpassed the 500 RSS reader mark. It reached 522 a few days ago, but I knew Feedburner fluctuates quite a bit so I decided to wait a few days before giving the milestone report. My blog fell back under 500 for one day, but has been at 500+ for quite some time now, so I believe it is now safe to say I have reached the 500 RSS reader goal. Any blog that is under 6 months old and has over 500 RSS readers means that it has a lot of potential, and mine is no different! Reaching 500 shows that a lot of people agree with me, and enjoy the free marketing strategies I give away on my blog. This brings me to the conclusion that expanding my blog from 500 RSS to 1000 RSS will be quite a bit easier than going from 0 to 500.
I look forward to expanding my blog for many months to come, and I hope you will enjoy the link building and marketing tips I will be posting this month.
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When I finally got around to getting this awesome theme released back in January, I redid all of my advertising prices as well as the way I did things. Since then, every advertisement link mentioned had the “nofollow” tag added to it, stopping Google from passing authority to the advertisers. I forgot one small detail though, back in my first month I had sold a few text links for $100 and forgot to add the nofollow tags to those, and some kind fellow decided to report my blog.
Long story short, Google found out and lowered my pagerank from 4 to 2. I wasn’t too worried about it, because my search engine traffic has actually gone up since then, so I knew it was only the toolbar number that went down. At any rate, I did a few very simple steps to getting my pagerank back that I thought would be very helpful to the thousands of blogs that got hit as well.
This isn’t rocket science, but I wanted to make this post to tell the thousands of blogs complaining about pagerank that they can stop complaining and get their pagerank back in TWO DAYS.
Getting Your Pagerank Back
Fix your mistakes. Add a rel=”nofollow” to every advertisers hyperlink.
Log your mistakes. Jot down the URL to every link that you fixed.
Change your policy. Make sure on your advertising page that you DO NOT pass pagerank.
Learn from your previous mistakes, don’t do them again!
When you are submitting your reconsideration request, you want to make it as precise as possible. It is going to be manually reviewed by REAL people, so you want to cater to them. For your convenience, I have documented/saved my exact reconsideration request that resulted in a manual review and me earning my pagerank 4 back. Please use it as an example, or a starting point, and not as word-for-word copy paste. You should want to personalize your own request, and make sure to mention all of the flaws you corrected and apologize for them, and promise not to do them in the future.
My Google Reconsideration Request:
To whom it may concern,
I have been blogging for a nearly 5 months, and about three months ago I completely redesigned my entire blog and made it fully compliant with the Google webmaster standards. All of my text links and paid reviews have “nofollow” on them. I did however, make the mistake of selling links inside posts in the very early days of my blog, which have resulted in my pagerank being reduced. I do apologize for that, and I have since “nofollowed” all of the external links in them. I have done the necessary changes to make sure that MixedMarketArts.com meets all of Google’s requirements, and I will continue to comply with the Google webmaster standards in the future.
You may see here ( http://mixedmarketarts.com/category/reviews/ ) that all reviews that are paid now have a notice at the top, and all the links inside those posts are nofollowed. This will let my readers know which posts are paid, and also it will let Google know which links to not pass pagerank too.
I appreciate you taking the time to read this, and I hope you can see that I comply fully with the Google webmaster standards. I would be very greatful if you could return my pagerank to my blog. Thank you!
I anticipated that Google would have thousands of requests to review, and it would take at least a month to get someone to take a look at it, but I guess I was wrong. It is now less than 48 hours since I submitted the request and my blog has had a manual review and it has passed the exam. My pagerank has been returned to a 4 and as far as I know, any penalties have been removed.
I hope this quick 15 minute guide will help you earn your pagerank back, and on a more personal note, I would like to thank BloggingMix for the initial inspiration of telling me to take 15 minutes out of my day to submit a request. Without that blog post, I wouldn’t have even cared about my pagerank because the traffic was still there. While I won’t get any more traffic now that my blog is a PR4, it is still nice to know that I don’t have any penalties on my domain.
I hope this quick guide helps you, and I look forward to everyone fixing their mistakes and getting their pagerank back. Good luck!
I have just finished upgrading to Wordpress 2.5, and it has a LOT of changes. I normally wait for an extra update before I take the time to get the newest version, but 2.5 is like four updates in one.
It completely changes the look and feel to the administrator panel, and it while it will take about 20 minutes to get use to, it will save a lot of time reading, writing, and moderating posts. Everything is nearly the same as it was before, but now it is a LOT easier to get to the pages you want to, and update what needs to be updated. The new look and feel is very web2.0, and I would dare say even a little cartoon like.
I like it a lot, and so I recommend you install the latest version after you read about all the features it has over at the development blog.
Before I begin, I just want to say a few things. This post is not meant to be counter-hostile in any way, but I just feel the need to express my opinion on the matter and want to get my reader’s thoughts as well. I also wanted to thank Collin for allowing me to write my first rant post. I also wrote this “rant post” on the fly (at 12:58AM), so I apologize if there is any typos.
Here is the embedded video so you may hear his entire opinion on the matter:
Collin (the other one) made a video expressing that offering the location of the PR7 blog I found should have been a free post, much like the other 20+ link building posts in the link building cookbook. This would be a very bad idea because unlike most of those sites, a blog that manually approves comments will know something is amiss when 450+ RSS readers start posting comments with backlinks in them. The idea of selling the blog location is, A: to earn money, and B: to limit the amount of interested parties.
Firstly, as you know by now, I offer far more free link building material for my readers to use for self-promotional purposes than anyone else in the link building niche. The 20+ free tutorials that are on there now would normally cost hundreds of dollars in some junky ebook on the Digitalpoint.com forums, but I give them away at no cost to my readers.
Secondly, in response to your comment, “you don’t need to get suckered into a bogus claim that there is a PR7 site out there that is giving out a whole bunch of free links… …this site was more or less probably purchased off of Hostgator or Godaddy as an expired domain name…” — The blog is a very powerful blog and not an expired domain. The company that owns the blog has a massive business plan and the blog is updated every few days with new posts. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme about buying an expired domain, selling links, and then the site drops. This is an actual high ranking authority blog that updates often and has been around for a very long time. The links are not anchor text, and the whole point of selling the location is so that companies can build there pagerank as well as search engine’s trust so that in the long run all of their pages will rank higher in the search engines.
With most of my free link building posts, the sites are so general that they can support thousands of webmasters replicating the process, but this is a blog that moderates comments daily. If I gave the URL out freely, the blog would have 450+ RSS readers making 1-3 comments in a period of 24 hours. The site would be hammered with comments, and the chances of every single dofollow link being changed to nofollow would increase substantially.
The 20 person limit is SUPPOSED to keep the majority of the readers away, as this post was not dedicated to new blogs who are still working their way up, unless they were investing long term. This method is for large sites (or companies) who are interested in doing a massive long-term promotion campaign without running the risk of buying links and getting penalized by Google.
As for your comment that “most people that claim that they are SEO experts are full of crap,” I will give you the benefit of the doubt in assuming you were referring to other bloggers, and not me personally. In the last few months, I have given my readers so many opportunities to build links to get more search engine traffic and ultimately more money online. However, if your comment was directed at me personally, I would like to know why you (and many others) are reading my blog if you believe I am full of crap, in opposition of the many comments I receive thanking me for helping them promote their blogs. I have never sold my SEO/viral marketing services publicly, all of my clients have come through networking and word of mouth. I am a strong believer in long term credibility and authority instead of short term sales pitches, and I hope over time you will see that is true. If you (or anyone else) would like to make a guest post on the topic, feel free to email me through the contact page at the top.
In conclusion, out of the 12 customers that have purchased the location, I have seen many of their comments approved already, and I have not had a single complaint or refund from any of them. I have, however, had four people thank me after their links were approved. If you do not think that $25 is worth it for you, then that is perfectly acceptable as that is your opinion, but to accuse me of scamming readers is pretty offensive. I believe you came to a lot of wrongful conclusions far to fast, and more research needed to be done.
I do realize if I did not make this post, the video would only have been seen by 25 people and I wouldn’t need to worry about it, but I really want to put this in the spotlight and get more opinions on it. If you would make a comment stating what you think about this post, that would be greatly appreciated. If you wish to remain private, you can also send me your opinion via email.
