GAMES AND GADGETS

I was one of the lucky few whose PR shot up during Google's last PR update. Frankly, I was surprised since I really didn't do much optimization on my site, just some that I felt like doing. I was glad and thankful for the PR4, however, very recently, my pagerank dropped from PR4 to PR0. I thought it was just a glitch on my Google toolbar but then my searchstatus firefox plug-in also showed a PR0. I thought there was another PR update but there was no news in the blogosphere so most probably, somebody reported my site as having paid links.

As you might notice, from the very prominent disclosure policy tag on the right, I'm a member of Payperpost. I don't have a lot of traffic on my blog so Google Adsense doesn't really work for me. I have to pay my internet bills as well as the gadgets that I so adore and my tuition fee for law school so my other bread and butter is Payperpost. Some people might call me a shill but hey, we're not all rich.

So what did I do? I did my research or should I say, I googled my problem and the fact is, getting back your PR is pretty easy and straightforward. According to some sites, Google isn't really against paid post, just the sharing of PR. If you have paid posts on your blog, there's two things that you have to do: First, label all your paid posts as "Sponsored reviews" or disclose it on every post, not just a site wide disclosure policy, Second, put the "nofollow" tag on the sponsored links in your post which should look like this: <a href="sponsor's link" rel="nofollow">Sponsor's anchor text</a>.

If you have done the above, log in or join Google's Webmaster Tools. On the right side of your dashboard you will see a request reconsideration link. Press that, submit your site, and explain that you have already made changes on your site so that it conforms with Google's Quality Guidelines, a little pleading might work too. After two to three days, Lo and Behold! Got my PR4 back.

Thanks to Admin Aaron, JHL, Robbo, and Wysz over at Google webmaster help for helping me out.