I noticed a couple of weeks ago that Adsense ads had stopped displaying on my London and Sydney websites and I had no idea why. I hadn’t received an email-of-doom to tell me I had been banned from the programme and all of my other sites were still working fine, so I was baffled. I made a couple posts to some web geek forums and nobody could shed light on my problem. I emailed Google and after no response for a week, I was ready to throw in the towel and accept that two of my sites had been banned and more might be on the way. Scary stuff.

My Adsense login email address had changed awhile ago for reasons I forget and realised today that I hadn’t checked the new Gmail address (that I never use), I had only checked the old Yahoo address. Yesterday I had a look at my Gmail account and, surprise, surprise, there was an email sitting there from the powers that be at Google about my websites, the reason it was banned and what I could do about it.

The reason the ads were pulled is because I had a ‘Partner Sites’ heading with a couple of text links under it and then an Adsense unit under those. According to Google, and I can see where they’re coming from, this is misleading as it makes the reader think that the Adsense unit is a partner site since it falls under that heading. I was told that only ‘Sponsered Links’ or ‘Advertisements’ were suitable headings and that I had to change this within 72 hours. If I didn’t respond in 72 hours, I was told the ads would be permanently pulled from the offending site.

As I hadn’t seen the warning for over three weeks I was way above the 72 hour limit and kind of crapping myself. I sent a borderline begging email reply saying that I had only just checked this email address, I had been a member of Adsense for over five years with no offences, that my site was full of quality content etc etc. I had a reply within the hour saying that if I made the changes, my Adsense would be reinstated on both sites within 48 hours.

Less than 24 hours later, Adsense is back on my London site and soon to be back on my Sydney site (I made a mistake with the code which didn’t fix the problem straight away). After hearing horror stories of Google banning people without any notification whatsoever, I’m really impressed with the speed of their replies and extremely happy they’ve been flexible with me about the 72 hours thing.

You can bet that from now on I will be paying closer attention to the Adsense terms and conditions and that I will be checking that Gmail account from time to time! Most of all, this experience has reminded me how easy it is for Adsense to be taken away and how important it is to diversify across as many income streams as possible.

Has anyone else ever run afoul of the Adsense gods?

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It seems as though Google might have caught up with my link selling ways, or maybe they’ve just jiggled around their PR calculations - either way, I’ve been walloped. They updated their Pagerank a couple of days ago and all of my sites felt the wrath.

Travoholic is now at PR2. Oh the humanity! My beloved site that I falsely believed was also loved by Google has well and truly learned its lesson. Stuck in London is still, very mysteriously, a PR0. Nerdy Nomad has dropped from PR4 to PR3 which is annoying because I had been blazing a little trail up the 45n5 Top 100 List. My PR5 travel insurance site has dropped to PR 4 which is still pretty high for a site like that. The only good news is that Wanderstruck went from PR0 to PR1. Yep. That’s the best I can do.

I guess the good news, for me, is that I went on a little links selling spree before the PR tanked across most of my sites. Some people would say that could be the reason for the drop in my PR… I would have to tend to agree that Google might just be onto me after all these years.

I had stopped paying much attention to PR but now that things are collectively dropping, I might start giving it a bit more attention and do my best to get the sites back up to scratch. When link sales is such a bit chunk of my paycheque each month, I would be stupid not to try to boost it back up.

It’ll be interesting to see if people renew their links that are due to expire within the next few months.

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So it looks like Google has finally graced our websites with a PR update with some people getting a mighty bitchslap and others coming away unscathed. I was one of the lucky ones who made out alright with this update, though I’m beginning to wonder more and more whether worrying about PR is just a huge waste of time. But even still, I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and post some thoughts about the recent update and how my sites did.

My budget travel site held tight at PR4 which is surprising since it’s a member of Text Link Ads and also an all out links whore. I’ve got so many paid links on that baby I don’t even remember which are legit anymore. I really should sort that site out but in the meantime I’ve got a bunch of links that are set to expire in December so hanging in at PR4 will make that a lot easier if I choose to go for renewals. When I sold them the site was PR5 so I’m curious to see if I’ll be able to get the same price.

My working holidays site also stuck at PR4 which I’m happy with. I’m going to attempt to sell links on this site but I’ll be going about it in a different way. Rather than heading to Digitalpoint in search of advertisers that are vaguely related to travel, I’m going to be contacting companies that would be a perfect fit as advertisers. Sort of like cold calling, I guess. I think selling links with this approach will rely less on PR and more on traffic stats and a well defined target market so I’m not too concerned with what the PR is on this site.

My living in London site jumped from PR2 to PR3 which was a bit of a disappointment considering this is my most popular site but I’ll be selling links directly to companies with this one too so I’ll be focusing mainly on improving my traffic.

It’s hard to say how my other sites did because I forget what their PR was before the update. I think everything has either stayed the same or jumped up by a point. Do I care? Not really.

I think the main thing that this whole manual downgrading of people’s PR has brought to light is how ruthless Google can be. They’ve identified private link sales as competition and are trying to stamp it out but I think they’re fighting an impossible battle, even for them.

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There seems to be a buzz on at the moment that Google is punishing website publishers who sell links. It’s Google’s search engine and they can do whatever they want but I think they’ve gotten things terribly wrong here and here’s why…

• Google are punishing the wrong people - It’s the link buyers who may be attempting to manipulate the SERPs and PR, not the sellers. If the big G can work out who are selling links then I’m sure they can come up with some way to figure out who’s buying them. It’s likely that sellers are already penalised because of an increase in outbound links on their site anyway.
• Not all link sales are meant to mess with Google’s methods - In the offline world SERPs and PR don’t exist but advertising is still sold in the bazillions. How can this be, you ask? Because the whole point of advertising is to get people to buy a product or service and that still applies to the online world. I wish someone would tell Google that not all links sales are based around finding evil and sneaky ways to beat their system.
• PR has no point - As far as I can tell, having a high PR doesn’t always equate to a better ranking in the SERPs. So what’s it’s purpose? It seems like the only point of PR is to help in determining how much people should pay when buying links (or websites). Ditching PR might throw the whole system into disarray and possibly even cause the internet to explode but at least it’d be harder to value links and maybe fewer people will buy them. Or not. Just a mad theory or mine.
• Google can’t own the whole internet (can they?) - Direct link sales puts all of the money into the webmaster’s pocket. Google doesn’t get any piece of the pie and they don’t like that. It also means there’s a little bit less of a chance the reader will click on Adsense, and it probably also reduces the amount that businesses are willing to spend of their marketing budget on Adwords. One wonders whether their aim is really to keep the integrity of their search system or if it’s more of an attempt to control as much of the internet’s advertising income as they possibly can. Things that make you go hmm.
• Punishing sites will compromise Google’s search results - Lots of sites selling links are of a good quality and if Google starts lowering PR and knocking them down the SERPs because they sell links then their search engine will start to lose some good results from the main pages and the user will suffer as a result.
• They’re not the boss of me, man - It’s my site and I’ll do whatever I want with it. I rely on The Goog for a lot of my traffic and if I ever got banned from their search engine it would be game over, but I guess that’s life. I’m not willing to let them tell me how to do business on websites that I’ve spent a zillion hours creating.

Try as they might, Google can’t control every aspect of the internet but it doesn’t look like that’s going to stop them from trying. For the love of god how much higher can their share price go?? Let us little people have a few crumbs, will ya?

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I don’t know anything about Technorati rankings and I’m not too clued up with the whole Alexa thing, but one thing I know well is Google’s Page Rank (PR). That little green PR bar at the top of my web browser is one of the most important things for those of us who dabble in selling links directly to other websites.

Since starting this blog a few weeks ago I’ve found myself reading other blogs a lot more often. I’ve discovered a whole bunch of gems out there and it seems like most of the blogs I’m reading at the moment are PR0. Some of these blogs seem really well established and have pretty solid followings. It’ll be really interesting to see how all these newish blogs do in the next update.

Whether you love of hate PR, it does make a difference when you’re trying to sell link space or sell paid reviews and I know that this next update is eagerly awaited by a lot of people. I’m really curious though to see how this site does. I’ve got some inbound links from my other sites including my mighty 7 year old site that Google is in love with. Links from that site have always served me well so I hope it stays that way.

Ok enough PR talk. I hate it when people go nuts with speculation and obsess over their rankings and I feel dirty for having raised this issue myself. Dirty I tell you. But whenever this next update happens, whether it be this month or in the next decade, I’ll be watching with interest and checking all the newish blogs to see how they’ve done.

Are you new bloggers out there with PR0 as eager to get this update in as I suspect?

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