So as many of you know I’m continually trying out various methods of earning revenue with my blog, and I’ve heard for a long time about the potential that text-link-ads holds for blog owners. I’m continually seeing sites with monthly revenue statements pulling in several hundred dollars a month for allowing publishers a link back to their site in exchange for a monthly fee.
It took me a couple of years, but I finally decided to give it a shot last week and installed the WordPress plugin that makes installation a since for people like myself with very little programming and html experience and then waited for the offers and money to roll in.
I didn’t have to wait very long for a response but I have to admit it wasn’t the response I was looking for.
Within 48 hours of installing the plugin my website went from being a PageRank 4 to a PageRank ZERO! YIKES!
Now while I know many of you belong to the group that says PageRank is irrelevant, and not to pay attention to it, something like this is still most definitely cause for concern in my eyes.
After checking my results with as many data centers and I could find and having the results all say the same thing, either PR0, or “Undefined” I started mentally going over anything I might have done in the past few days or so that could have warranted the penalty.
- I’d started a more aggressive commenting campaign (I usually try and read five of my fellow bloggers, and comment on their sites and this week I’d kicked it up to twenty or so.
- As I mentioned I’d signed up for Text-Link-Ads two days prior but had not sold any ad spots yet.
- I’d done some social bookmarking, but nothing I hadn’t done before, and nothing extreme.
Now I couldn’t do anything about the comments I’d already left, or the bookmarking I’d already done, and after logging into Webmaster Tools and finding no indicator of why I’d been hit by this penalty (I should note that my rankings all stayed the same as did my Google referred traffic), I decided to pull the plugin for Text-Link-Ads and wait a few days before submitting a site reconsideration to Google and begging them to go easy on me!
It turns out I didn’t need to wait a few days, within about 6 hours my PageRank was back at PR4 across all data centers, and everything looked good. I’ve since done some research and it turns out others have been hit by the same penalty. I have noticed there are sites online using TLA with no apparent penalty from big G, but it just isn’t something I’m prepared to take a chance with.
So in conclusion I can’t say with 100% certainty that the two events are definitely related, but it should be something you’re aware of. If you find this page prior to installing the plugin, go in with the knowledge of what might happen, and if you’re hit remove it as quick as possible.
If on the other hand you’ve arrived at this page because your site has already been hit with a penalty, try removing the plugin, and giving it a few days to see if it returns to normal. Make sure you continue your link building efforts in the interim. If it doesn’t return to normal after the wait you can still apply to Google for a site PageRank reconsideration.
Let them know you made a mistake, are now aware of what that mistake was, and that you’ve taken steps to remove the plugin. I’ve read of several sites that had their stats returned back to normal after taking this course of action.
The most important thing to remember is not to get discouraged. I know you’ve spent a fair bit of time and effort in building up your blog or website, and something like this can come as quite a shock. Simply go about business as usual, and either you’ll get it back, or you’ll have to wait till the penalty expires and your site returns to normal. The good news is that keyword rankings don’t seem to be affected by these PR penalties.
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About Warren
HI…I really need this right now and I thank you for letting us know about this post…great job!!
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I would say that’s pretty darn scary. Page Rank absolutely matters. Thanks for the heads up and I am glad you got things put back right!
Thanks Shawn, I’m with you. Probably one of the first things I see when I visit a website is the PageRank, and then the other numbers like Alexa, RSS, Followers, comments, etc. It can be a good indicator of what I can expect from the site.
That’s some great insight. It’s great we learn about this a bit earlier than usual so we can amend our marketing strategies.
Ouch, they were really quick in the PR update in both directions! I am usually not risk-shy but I wouldn’t go with TLA. I admit I have tried Backlinks.com but wasn’t very happy with the results. It is true that the blog I ran them on back then had a PR2 only but still it wasn’t what I expected and I dropped them pretty soon.
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I’ve read a fair bit about them, but hadn’t realized Google would be so quick as you mentioned. There are enough other ways to monetize a site that I won’t miss them at all.
I forgot to include it in the previous comment but how about InfoLinks? They aren’t very obtrusive and I hear they do bring money. In my opinion, this is an alternative.
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