Crap. My Page Rank just went to zero. What do I do now? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

I have never had my page rank go down, but as of May 5th it was apparently brought down to zero. Any advice for how I can bring it back up?

Login to Webmaster Tools and see what it says. That is always step one with PR questions.

That sucks. 

By the way, I've had emails from three friends who've found their page ranks knocked down to zero in the last three weeks. It seems to be more on a rolling basis than one swoop as in the past.

I've heard that this is happening to a lot of people; apparently Google is trying to clear out link farms. The solution is to add the "nofollow" tag to all your affiliate links.

Off to check my own page rank now . . .

Annie

Thanks all for the helpful comments. I went through the painstaking process of changing every single one of my links to no follow last night (not an easy task when you have over 800 posts on your site). I have asked Google for reconsideration, and now I wait…. Sounds like it could take at least a month or more to see any change or get any kind of response.

Getting a manual action revoked can be either an enormously difficult process or easy, depending on what it is Google thinks you are doing.  My advice is if you WERE doing something that violates their guidelines and you want pagerank, immediately stop doing it, fix it, and then in your reconsideration request 'fess up, explain that you've fixed it, and promise never to do it again.  That's the "easy" way to get the action revoked. 

The difficult process comes in if you actually weren't doing anything on purpose to violate their guidelines. In that case, you've got to figure out what it is they think you're doing wrong (which could be a huge number of things, some of which are beyond your control) and then fix it.  Often "fixing it" in that case involves contacting people you don't know multiple times over an extended time period to ask them to change things on their web sites, then disavowing their sites if they don't eventually respond or you aren't able to contact them despite having tried via their web site, their info in whois, their social media, etc. When you submit your reconsideration requests (because it's likely to take more than one) in that case, in addition to promising to do everything you can to make sure whatever it is doesn't happen again, you've got to have thoroughly documented what you've done to try to fix it, including dates you've contacted others, etc. Use Google docs to do that.

One important note: Google will give you hints as to what the problem(s) is/are, but they won't come out and tell you for sure in detail and they won't give you complete or exhaustive examples, so don't expect them to.  They do try to help but seem to be limited in what they're allowed to say.

Any luck Derek? I know I'm late to the game, but Jackie is spot on. You don't want every link to be nofollow, only ads and things you don't trust. I put nofollow on carnivals (I could do an entire post in one click with Genesis SEO) and deleted roundups to be safe as well when they started going after people like this.

I had this happen. NoFollowed the offending links (all the paid ones), submitted for reconsideration. Within 4 weeks had my PR back. Then slowly DoFollowed the links. Had been deleting/NoFollowing as they expire, and quit with paid links as of last August.

This is why i would only settle for a 1-year link, so I could eventually retire them. Almost all gone now, and some have actually asked for them to be deleted. Google is definitely bringing down the hammer on paid links.

On the bright side, I focused more on my brand and affiliate links, and my revenue has never been higher. Also, not posting spam has built reader trust, I always felt slimy putting those up. 

If I could give newbies any advice, is have a mission statement, and never lose sight of that mission. If you want to sell spammy links, go for it, but know you will get penalized and then just move on. If you want to build a brand and help people, then no direct ads, build readership and trust, and go with affiliate sales with integrity. :)

My $0.02 

Post edited 8:55 pm – June 2, 2014 by frugaling

Debs,

Wikipedia isn't bad at all. NoFollow is a tag that you place on HTML links.

For instance, here's a link to wikipedia:

<a href="http://www.wikipedia.org">Wikipedia</a>

And with a NoFollow tag:

<a href="http://www.wikipedia.org" rel="NoFollow">Wikipedia</a>

All the NoFollow tag is saying is that Google (or another search engine) shouldn't follow the link to see where it goes. There robots that scour the Internet will not count that as a link out. 

NoFollow is only really needed when you're linking to something sponsored or ad-like. I use NoFollow for affiliate links. You don't need NoFollow for Wikipedia.

Matt Cutts explained it pretty well in this video:

Can nofollow links hurt my site's ranking?

Hope this helps!

Sam

Update: I just discovered that Google has denied my reconsideration request on May 22. Here is their reason:

"Unnatural links from your site: Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes."

I don't get it. Any "unnatural" link that I have ever placed on my site has either been deleted or no-followed. The only other thing I can think of is the affiliate program that I have partnered with: "Ebuzzing". For them to control the ads, I have placed a code in my footer which allows them the power to update and remove various ads. Do you think this could be the culprit? 

–Derek