Back in October 2007 Google went on the warpath against sites that sold text links and reduced their Page Ranks. This site was one of those penalised, with its Page Rank reduced from 6 to 3. At first Ididn’t know what to do, and because this site was making a decent amount of cash from selling Text Link Ads I thought I would carry on selling links until the advertisers inevitably deserted me because of my new low Page Rank.
However, the advertisers didn’t desert me as expected and nearly two years later I was still left with several advertisers. My Google traffic continued to come through, but I’ve just decided to remove the links because it’s dragged on too long and I don’t want to risk incurring Google’s wrath further and maybe even getting delisted completely. Being removed from the Google index would be a disaster for this site, which still receives around 70% of traffic from Google.
Should I have removed my text links sooner? Probably. I’m going to inform Google of the change and let them know that I’m being a good, responsible web citizen and ask that they reconsider my site to see if I can recover some of my Page Rank.
I’ll let you know if I manage to reclaim some blogging Page Rank rights!
