Lost PageRank? Can You Get it Back?

Posted by kristinewirth on August 19

A question that’s often asked (nearly everywhere SEO is talked about it seems) is about PageRank and what to do if all of a sudden the awesome PageRank you just had yesterday – has tanked or worse yet, disappeared all-together.

If your PageRank has Dropped

First, determine what has really happened.  If you had a PageRank of 5 yesterday and you all of a sudden have a PageRank of 1, all is not lost.  This could actually mean a variety of things.  One of them is that one of the sites linking to you has seen a significant drop in PageRank itself.  Remember, when other sites link to you (and especially if they’re one way links), you get a portion of their PageRank passed on to you.

So if you had a site that had a PageRank of 7 linking to you, thus helping your own PageRank status, and they all of a sudden dropped to a 3 (as an example) then your PageRank will likely be affected.

Now consider this PageRank drop with not one site but with multiple sites.  This would definiately have an adverse effect on your overall PageRank.

The first thing to do would be to check and see if there have been any changes to the PageRank of the sites linking to you.  But first, you have to know who is linking to you.

One way to do this is with Yahoo’s site explorer tool.  Enter in your domain name, click “inlinks” and then choose “except from this domain” from the drop-down list.  This will show you all of the links pointing to your own site.

Visit these sites and be sure that none of them have been removed from Google’s index.  (You can find this out by typing in the Google search box the following – site:thenameofthesite.com.)  If nothing comes up, they’ve been removed from the index and this could be one of the causes of your drop in PageRank.

You can also use Google Analytics to see who is sending you traffic via the “Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites” link.

If Your PageRank is Gone

Ok, this is probably one of the worst-case scenarios.  If you previously had a PageRank on your site, even if it was as little as a 1, and all of a sudden you look up at your trusty Google toolbar and notice that the PageRank of your web page is now gray, this can be a very significant issue.

The first thing to do is to first check that URL in Google and see if it’s still indexed.  Just type in the Google search box site:yoursiteurl.com and see if something comes up.  If it doesn’t, it means that you’ve probably been removed from Google’s index.

So what should you do?

Well, if this were to happen to you that means that Google felt that you were doing something illegal; or at least something against their webmaster guidelines.

So you first need to ask yourself a few questions.

• Did you use any kind of black-hat techniques on your site?  Things such as cloaking, invisible text, redirection, etc.  If so, this could likely be the reason.
• Were you selling links from your site?  Likely that this could be the issue.
• Did you offer any downloads off of your site that could have contained malicious code?

There are many possible questions that you could ask yourself – and far too long of a list to post here; but the bottom line is that if you were doing something “illegal” in the search engines eyes, they probably found out about it and you are now feeling the reprucussions.

You can also check out Google’s business listing quality guidelines andGoogle’s webmaster guidelines to double-check to be sure you were following the rules.

If you have a Google webmaster account, log in and see if you have any messages from Google.  If you’re lucky, they’ll have sent you a message telling you why your site was removed.

Whatever it is that they tell you, FIX THE ISSUE.  Once you have the issue fixed, you’ll next need to submit a reinclusion request.  Which could take a bit of time so be prepared to wait and ready to explain yourself.

This post is an excerpt from Bonehead Bits – The SEO Newsletter.  To get your copy before the public does (for free), click here now and get signed up.

Google Accounts on Twitter

Posted by kristinewirth on July 23

Earlier this month, Google posted a list of Twitter accounts specific to Google.  If you want to read the original post, visit http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-accounts-on-twitter.html.

That said, here’s the list:

The Google AdWords Class Action Lawsuit

Posted by kristinewirth on June 11

2 days ago myself, along with all U.S. AdWords Advertisers received a notice that Google was being sued for $20 MM (million) because it was alleged that AdWords advertisers were being charged just above their daily limits on their AdWords campaigns.

As an example, if you had set a daily budget of $20 for a Campaign, at the end of the day your total cost might be $20.73 or $21.12 instead of just $20 or a few cents below that figure.

Just pennies to one individual but overall a huge income earner for Google.

Consider this for a moment.  Let’s say for the sake of argument that there are 300,000 (and I’m being conservative here) campaigns running every day at a set budget of $20.

That grosses Google $6,000,000 dollars a day.  However, let’s say that each of these advertisers were only charged $.20 over their daily budget.  $.20 doesn’t seem like much does it?  Not to you or to me as an individual, but as a whole, that same $.20 on each advertisers accounts grosses Google $60,000 a day.

Now consider that same $60,000 over the course of 30 days.

$60,000 x 30 = $1,800,000.  Quite a little added “extra” in income isn’t it?

Google claims that regardless of what the minor fluctuations are each day on a campaign (and I’m paraphrasing here), will still only add up to the advertisers monthly budget.

So regardless of the pennies here and the pennies there, if you had set up a budget of only spending $400 in a month, then your cost would not go over that $400 regardless of what the daily minute charges were.

All this being said, it is interesting to note that literally the day after I received the lawsuit email, my daily budgets were pennies BELOW what I had set whereas prior to receiving the lawsuit information my budget was pennies ABOVE what I had set as my daily limit.

Coincidence?

Here’s the official gist of it:

“The Court has certified a Settlement Class defined as: all persons and entities residing in the United States who have paid Google for advertising pursuant to Google’s AdWords program who (a) became AdWords advertisers between June 1, 2005 and February 28, 2009, inclusive, and who were charged more than their per day Daily Budget on any day during that time period; or (b) paused their AdWords advertising campaigns on any day during the period from January 1, 2002 to February 28, 2009, inclusive, and during the same billing period when their AdWords advertising campaigns were paused, were charged more than the product of their per day Daily Budget times the number of days that such Class Members’ advertising campaigns were not paused during that billing period.”

Now, this has been going on for some time as many of you might know – it tends to move in and out of “buzz” since the time periods between what’s actually going on is very long.  However, Eric Goldman’s blog gives you all of the history you need to know regarding this case as well as all of the information on the most current Class Action Settlement.

So if you’ve been wondering what all the buzz and noise online is about, this would be it.

Talk soon!