From my blog friend Kate at I Think, Therefore I Blog, I learned about Yahoo! Site Explorer and the site explorer badge. It displays the links that your site or blog has on the web. I’ve got it there on my sidebar right under the RSS feed subscription and Add to Technorati links-see?
I’m suggesting that we display this badge to show advertisers how many potential ways there are for people to get to our sites. MomReviews did not deserve to have it’s PageRank stripped away. At the time it went to zero, I had exactly one affiliate link, the badge for The FIRM workout DVDs, which I display because it’s a system I use and want to promote, not because I wanted to give my PageRank away. I just added the WidgetBucks badge because I believe in promoting Lead Free Toys for Christmas, not because I want to stick it to Adsense.
MomReviews has still not been approved for Text Link Ads, and I had one advertiser through LinkWorth, but I guess they didn’t renew their ad when it expired because their link disappeared. So why did Google penalize this blog by taking away it’s PageRank? I can only assume it’s because I write paid posts.
If Google wants to replace my paid post income with some sort of guaranteed monthly ad income, then they can certainly make me an offer. But because I know that is not going to happen, I am going to continue to do what I have been doing-writing good posts, including reviews of products and websites, and occasionally accepting money to do so. I provide a service, I get paid. So does a waitress, a plumber, a secretary. Just because my service is on the Internet does not mean it has to be free. I take blogging very seriously-heck, my business card reads “Professional Blogger”, because I see this as a job. Sure, it’s fun, and it’s a way to remember my life at this time, but it’s also a way for me to contribute income to my family.
And that is something that Google can never take away from me.
The Yahoo links button is interesting but I really would like something better. Something that not only counts the number of links but also the authority of those links. I posted on the hope someone provides a useful measure for link based web page authority now that Google has turned pagerank into something else. And hopefully that one can be much more up to date.
Good idea! I lost My PR on one of my blogs too. What dirtbags!lol!
That’s weird. Are you still getting hits from people coming in from Google? From what I’ve heard, page rank isn’t a huge factor at Google any more anyway…
Alden-Google still sends me the largest portion of my referrer traffic, second is StumbleUpon, and third is PayPerPost. I’m not boycotting Google, I’m just saying, I can’t let Google’s arbitrary taking away of my PageRank ruin blogging for me.
Cool, it doesn’t sound like you’ve been banned then. Maybe it’s just a bug in their page rank calculations and they’ll get it fixed?