As I’m sure you’ve noticed, everyone in the blogosphere has been talking about the Google PageRank update. People have been waiting for this update for quite some time now, because it was expected to be unleashed unto the virtual world months ago. And then most people received a lump of coal for their efforts, myself included.
Now, I haven’t been all that excited and anxious about the PR update as some other people, but I think I may be one of the people that has been hit the hardest. Prior to the update, Beyond the Rhetoric was a PageRank 5 for the homepage, as well as for most of the individual posts. After the update, this has fallen to a not-so-good PR2. Normally, I wouldn’t care all that much, but it seems that the consensus is that Google is “punishing” people who sell paid links. You see sponsored links in the sidebar and links within paid reviews on this blog, but they’re all indicated as such.
PR2. That’s not good. I started to wonder if this bitch slap would affect my search engine rankings. I’ve been trying to rank for the very competitive term freelance writing and I haven’t been all that successful thus far, so I can’t really speak as to whether the PR update made matters worse. I did know, however, that I was the number one result for my own name: Michael Kwan. Has this changed?
Apparently not! A search for Michael Kwan on Google still yields my blog and my freelance writing site as result number one and number two, respectively. This means that I’m still tops for my own name, but I’m starting to wonder how this will affect the price of text link ads sold on this site. I’m not going to stop selling paid links, because TLA is quickly becoming one of the best moneymakers on this blog.
How has the Google PageRank update affected your blog? Do you still rank for your critical keywords and keyword phrases?
I’ve actually gone up from a PR3 to a PR4 ranking. But I don’t do paid reviews nor do I use TLA.
Ouch! That’s a major setback. I was just happy to finally get a PageRank at all. I suppose I should be happy with what I got considering that I have a higher rank than some very well established bloggers.
I’m beginning to think that I didn’t get docked for offering paid links and paid reviews because I haven’t actually sold any yet.
paid links can still be used, as long as every link is with a nofollow. There should not be a problem. Giving Traffic juice is what google is accepting.
I dont understand why paid review would matter at all to google. I dont understand there point at all.
Add nofollow’s to those links in those paid reviews, and Google won’t care.
What about the TLA links both in the sidebar and the within posts?
It doesn’t seem to have hurt our PR or traffic. I’ve found over time that few words are really critical words. Having a lot of content and high authority outweighs the value of any single term.