This post is more for the benefit of google than my readers.
My pagerank took a severe battering recently, decreasing from a 4 to a 2! That’s a hefty penalty slapped on Musclehack.
I’ve no doubt I’ll get it back to 4 with quality regular content but I’d rather have it back sooner rather than later.
After a little research I have found that google doesn’t look too kindly on ‘Text Link Ads‘. Text Link Ads are a way for bloggers to make a little money by selling a link to an external sites.
A month or so ago I got my first offer. As the link wasn’t intrusive and was to a quality site, (I would never sell links to crappy supplements or companies I didn’t think were reputable) I decided to approve it.
In total I have sold just 3 links in 3 articles out of a total of 150 articles posted on this site. And for this I have made a grand total of…drum roll…………
$18.95!!
In return for $18.95 I lose 2 points on my pagerank meaning my articles will be indexed lower on google’s search engine results pages, which means I get less visitors to this site every day, ouch!!
Anyway, the solution is simple. I have now canceled ALL Text Link Ads and will never again permit them on this site. They’re gone for good, it’s over!
I’m hoping my pagerank will be restored very shortly. If not, it will be in time anyway as I add more content and the blog continues to grow in popularity.
It’s true, we learn from our mistakes and this has been a valuable lesson for me.
Message to new bloggers: research everything before making a move. If you’re in this for the long term and want your work to get a quality reputation, be sure to act with integrity at every turn.
Not that I didn’t, I genuinely had NO idea that there were penalties for such a thing. However, just google ‘pagerank’ and ‘text link ads’ and you’ll get all the info you ever needed on the subject. I didn’t take his step and therefore have to accept responsibility for acting without doing my due diligence.
To Google: I’m wearing sackcloth and ashes. Please restore my pagerank.
As another precaution, I’ll also be contacting some of those I recently swapped links with to take them down as this may also have contributed to the decrease in rank. Rest assured, any further links to MuscleHack will be organic.
Mark McManus
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The Muscle Hacker is Mark McManus, a 28 year old guy committed to helping others build the type of body they desire. Mark is a naturally skinny guy who overcame the hardgainer's curse through years of research and personal experience. Whether you want to build new slabs of muscle or drop your body fat percentage to reveal
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
got used to the old look but hey… nice new look – one thing in older browsers the template doesn’t display right… IE6 etc.
with regards PR, hope it gets back up soon!
Hey Mark.
Yeah, Google can be a tricky animal sometimes. At the end of the day, however, I agree that the Google Beast feeds on quality content, so just keep feeding it (and your readers) what it wants, and you should get bumped back up soon enough.
I like the new look; keep writing!
Ben
It seems like lately Google has been running a pretty stiff campaign against paid links, and TextLinkAds definitely falls into that category. Pretty lame I agree!
Yeah definitely. Well. I’ve played my part now.
Hi Mark,
Google looks at link “quality” and this can be more important than quantity of links, as the google spiders are trying to check for “spam” sites (not suggesting yours is BTW!!) which try to fool the spiders. This can come from comments at the end of articles, URLs in user names, etc as much as anything else, though the TextAds will surely be the main culprit.
Avoid un-regulated links at all costs! You could try introducing the “nofollow” attribute to link tags which you have not personally verified for quality. This stops the Google spiders using the link in their page rank calculation. This feature was introduced by Google for exactly this purpose.
Cheers, and good luck!
Rich