Around this time last year, Beyond the Rhetoric had a PageRank of 4. Everything seemed to be rolling along just fine with my Alexa and Technorati ranks improving as well. The number of backlinks were steadily increasing as more people came to discover what this blog was all about. The jump to WordPress certainly made a world of difference.

And then the collateral damage started. Google started to crack down on anyone doing sponsored posts or selling paid text links (I’m guilty of both). As the year rolled along, I came to be on the receiving end of a Google PageRank smackdown. Beyond the Rhetoric was downgraded from a PR4 to a PR2. All was not lost, because I was still indexing and ranking for certain keywords (like Richmond Night Market). As Google continued on their rampage, however, things started to get worse.

I later discovered that some malicious code gave me a PR0. Having removed that code and sent Google a message indicating as such, I remained hopeful that the next PageRank update would bring good news. Now that the update is rolling its way through the web, it seems that some good news is a-coming.

Google PageRank Update for Beyond the Rhetoric

It’s not quite the PR4 that I had before, but a PR2 is certainly better than a PageRank of zero. Yes, I know that PageRank isn’t quite as meaningful as it has been in the past and it’s more important to focus on things like growing the number of RSS subscribers, but it’s still an area that I pay some attention to.

The weird thing is that the above screenshot was taken from this PageRank checker. When I run the same check through iWebTool, Beyond the Rhetoric is still a PR0. Matt Freedman confirms that the Google Toolbar is reporting a PR2, so I guess it’s just taking some time to perpetuate through the servers.

So, I’m back on the PageRank saddle. With more RSS subscribers and higher traffic numbers than ever, it’s only a matter of time before I get back to PR4, right?