PR dropped to 4. Presumed guilty.
Yeah, I know, I’m late to the PR drop whine party but yesterday GT’s dropped from a strong 5 to 4 so I thought I’d share my side of the story too.
Let’s get the usual suspects out of the way -
- Never bought links for GT
- Never sold links on GT
- Never pursued reciprocal links
- Don’t even have a blog roll
- I’m not in any crosslinked networks
- Never did any paid reviews, etc
- Never sold any advertising on GT
- I’ve never directly linked to TLA or similar, or used them
Seriously, how many sites can really say the above?
What did I do wrong then?
The best I can tell is I got nailed for my links to my friend Chris’ Asterisk PBX blog. I linked him in the sidebar and also gave him a sponsor page both of which I’ve now taken down.
In total there was one sitewide link and four on the sponsor page to his blog. That’s it on the whole site, I know because outside of that everything is either a real blog post or it’s Adsense.
Hmm… I also have nine sitewide links to Google, I wonder how those factor in here?
But this is annoying as hell.
I should have one of the cleanest link profiles on the web and I get wacked with a PR slap for linking to my friend!? Really, the only suspect links in GT’s profile would be those that were given to me or that I gave to others over the years and that number is tiny.
I think my mistake was using the word ’sponsor’ on the page. But he’s not a real sponsor (again I’ve never sold ads on GT), that page was a way for me to recommend my friend’s site and send him some traffic, I labeled it sponsored so that every friend with a blog wouldn’t email me asking for a review. And also since I think Google at one time said you should.
Do I deserve this?
I’ve been promoting Google for free for years, I only use Adsense for monetization, I have 37k+ natural backlinks, and I’m reduced to a PR4 for linking to a friend five times? The worst way it could be looked at is as a single sponsored post, is one post really worthy of a PR reduction?
PR is about first impressions
I don’t care about PR for ranking or ad sales, I care about it from a respectability standpoint. Like it or not PR says a lot about your web site and I worked hard to get it where it was.
Now at first glance it looks like GT is a brand new site, thank you Google 
I really hope you’ll reconsider…
use google webmaster for reconsideration..
they might well increase your PR if you deserve
by the way I got PR 3 for my 2 months old domain..
and I also dont sell links
I am loving it!!
thanks for the suggestion, I might try that.
congrats on your new PR!
TechBurgh got a PR4 for it’s first this week. I was quite surprised.
I’m not terribly concerned about PageRank though.
I’d rather follow on Compete, which gives a broader, more in-depth analysis. (in which you also kick my butt!) http://siteanalytics.compete.com/googletutor.com+techburgh.com?metric=uv
I’d not loose any sleep over it. As long as people are visiting your site (which they evidently are) be happy with that. Not belittling it though.
Oh, great blog by the way
[...] lot of bloggers are upset about the Google PankRank update designed to penalize bloggers who sell links. The PageRank updates [...]
In some ways for me the worst thing are those web design blogs in many ways (those with exceptional content) that can roll up a PR6 almost overnight.
I don’t know how much you can rely on Yahoo backlinks these days, but when I check you only have 12K
It all really comes down to the quality of links, but if you have continued to gane them, then being knocked off a PR5 is rough.
That being said, your site is still in flux, though showing mainly PR4
http://digpagerank.com/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.googletutor.com&dc=18
I am still showing 3s 4s and 5s
my 6 months old site got PR 0 to 2 . Is it fast or slow ? I am aware everyone is talking about Google PR, what have they done right or wrong .Honestly, I dun care or or even bother trying keep up to the latest trend of ever changing Google algorithm.Is PageRank really so important ? to prove oneself:”Hey I guess it right this season ?” or to show who ? can Tutor care to share more ?
techburgh, watch out you don’t lose yours too, I notice you are doing paid reviews which is a likely cause for this type of penalty.
andy beard, Y! links for me shows 13k to just the home page, but shows 38.8k to the entire site which is what I was referring to. and if you look most are very high quality, targeted, and natural.
My page rank also dropped from PR6 to PR5 and I have no idea why. I wonder if there are other sites experiencing a drop and this is some greater overhaul?