MichaelMcKinlay.com

Well the hour has arrived! I’ve finally got my Google PageRank back! After a few months of having my PageRank at a rank of 0, Google has restored it!

Now you may be wondering, “Hey Mike, what is Google PageRank and why is it important?” According to Wikipedia, “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. In other words, PageRank is a measure of how important a particular page is and factors in to how highly your page comes up in Google’s search engine. The higher your rank, the more likely you are to rank higher in a particular search, which would give you more traffic. It’s also a bit of a status symbol, and that’s why I’m happy that I’ve got mine back! Ultimately, I am hoping more traffic will equal more readership for MichaelMcKinlay.com!

So how did I lose my PageRank? I ended up losing my PageRank a few months ago when I was using this blog to write articles for Pay Per Post. Pay Per Post is a service that allows bloggers to earn a little bit of money by writing about certain products and services. If your blog had a high Google PageRank you would have more opportunities to earn money as more advertisers would want you to write about their products or services on your site, thus gaining them more exposure. It was a great little way to subsidize the cost of having my own website and it also gave me topics to write about if I had a bad case of writer’s block.

Google didn’t like what Pay Per Post was doing and so if they found that a blogger selling links, (as I was on my blog through Pay Per Post) they would knock that bloggers rank down to 0. This created a problem for me and Pay Per Post, because without my PageRank, Pay Per Post’s advertisers became less interested in advertising on my site.. So you see, it was all a vicious circle that sent my blog on a downward spiral. My blog now had no rank, and therefore hardly any company was interested in me writing about them. I was used, I tell ya, used!!!! My blog felt like a disgusting old kleenex tossed to the side of the road… O.K. I guess I’m being overly dramatic but I’ve gotta have some fun, right?

Anyway if you find yourself in this predicament, here is what you can do to get yourself out. Or at least what I did.

1. Add “nofollow” tags to all “paid” links.
2. Remove any tools that Pay Per Post asked you to install on your blog.
3. Use Google’s WebMaster Tools to submit an application to have your Google PageRank restored for your website. Once Google sees that you’ve added “no follow” tags to your “paid” links they will like your website a whole lot more!
4. Wait. (I submitted my request on Saturday, January 12th and I think my rank was restored today, Tuesday January 15th!) I can’t believe they fixed it so quickly!

I’m so glad to be back in the game baby, and I hope this will result in more traffic to my site. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if it works!

A special shout-out goes out to my Net Buddy 4 Life, Nick Ramsay from LongCountDown.com who helped proofread this post. Without my Net Buddy, I’d be lost and so I give thanks! Now go visit his site!