Man, I just don’t understand Google PageRank, it makes no sense.

My Rock Along Productions blog turns out has a PR of 4:
http://www.rockalongproductions.com has Google PageRank 4 out of 10

Yet my This Blog, my Poetry Blog Wanderer Thoughts and my personal blog Justin Germino have PR of 0.

What doesn’t make sense is Dragon Blogger has over 300 unique visits per day, over 8500+ external links on Google WebMasterTools, yet Rock Along Productions has barely 200 external links, less than 50 unique visits per day.

This only confirms that Google Penalizes you for doing paid posts (Rock Along Productions is a company blog and I don’t do paid advertising on it).  But I don’t do paid advertising on the poetry blog either, so not sure why that is so low (maybe too new of a blog).

Also linking to other blogs hurts your blog PR, as the “SEO Juice” from a previous post, you leak your PR to other blogs reducing your own by creating too many links out.  Again, I am trying to figure out how to get around the vicious double edged sword.

Does anyone actually qualify for the like $60.00 or $100.00 paid opps on PayPerPost and do the post and still retain a PR of 5 or higher for most of these post requirements?

Just some stuff I am thinking about.

-Dragon Blogger

I have been doing a ton of research on SEO Optimization and how to restore my Google PageRank and avoid having my PageRank whacked in the future. I want to point out that this link tracks a conversation between SEO Scoop, Matt Cutts from Google, and other bloggers who were all penalized from having paid content on their site. This is a must read link:
Matt Cuts Why Am I Still Being Penalized

In summary, every single paid or sponsored post you do, you need to try and use a rel=”nofollow” inside the link itself. If you do SocialSpark or PayPerPost links you will find that they automatically have the <a rel=”nofollow” right at the beginning of the link, but PayU2Blog does not, and I am certain that by me doing 8 PayU2Blog Posts with links to the sponsor’s without rel=nofollow is why my Google PR was whacked from 2 to 0.

By default when linking to any other site, unless it is a fellow blogger that you want to give “props” to.  Make sure you use a “nofollow” tag.  This appears to be the consensus from what I can determine by reading over 3 dozen web sites and scouring the web the last few days on Google.

Google is especially sensitive to paid posts and doesn’t like Text Link Ads (that aren’t Google’s own Adsense).  I am still learning more my friends and attempting to make my blog more “Google Friendly” yet still qualify and monetize my blog.  It is a catch-22 when many opportunities on SocialSpark and PayPerPost require your blog to be a PR of 3 or above, and yet you lose your PR if you do paid posts.

How Ironic

-Dragon Blogger

• Update

Just a note to my readers, PayU2Blog prohibits adding nofollow to the links in their paid advertisements.  I had asked them prior to doing anything.  I am sure you can add nofollow after a certain “archive period” of time has elapsed, but don’t use nofollow on new paid assignments.

I have been reading many other blogs who have reported the same google ranking loss, and it seems that one thing that is apparent.  Google clearly penalizes blogs who try to do some paid posts for money.  I did do about 10 paid posts over the past two weeks, and even though I have over 120+ posts and less than 10% are paid content, the paid links are what everyone has said kills your pagerank.

Makes it hard to figure how to monetize your blog when many paid opps require a PR of 3, 4 or 5+ and yet to do paid opps you lose your PR.  Kind of like a double edged sword in my opinion.

So I am stuck just doing my promotion and networking as usual, my paid opp’s have dried up at this point.  Gonna be real hard to make some extra money this month it would seem.  However, I am not going to be discouraged, I enjoy blogging and would do it even if there was no way to make money at it.  I am hooked now and doing it for the enjoyment of doing it, and meeting new people along the way.

First off, I have only been blogging for about 40 days now and I have heard other people rant about the Google Pagerank instability and having been “hit” by Google Pagerank.  I don’t believe how yesterday and for the last two weeks my blogs was a PR2 and then today bam I am now slammed with a PR0.  I didn’t convert my site from http://dragonblogger.com to http://www.dragonblogger.com, my backlinks, and all external links are growing and not shrinking.

My IZEARank is <400, my Alexa rank is 300,000 3 month average and <150,000 1 week average.  So what gives, how does something like this happen?

The bad thing is now my blog won’t qualify for many of the opps that require PR2 or above, so my blog goals just got a lot harder to achieve.

So, go ahead my fellow bloggers, rant here about your Google Pagerank story.  Who else has been burned?