How to lose your Google PageRank in ONE easy step! Q & A
Posted on October 28th, 2007 by Richard Catto 3,059 views
I keep seeing people asking this question all over the Blogosphere – how does one get rid of one’s Google PageRank?
See, the problem is that sites with a high Google PageRank (7+) get a LOT OF "FREE" TRAFFIC from Google.
Q: Why?
A: Because their URLs appear high up in organic search engine results pages (SERPs) which leads to lots of people clicking them and arriving at those sites. That causes lots of bandwidth to be consumed and if you’re hosted in South Africa that is a BAD THING!
Q: Why?
A: Because bandwidth is very expensive in South Africa.
Q: So why not host elsewhere where bandwidth is cheap, like in the United States?
A: Well you could do that but then you’d be very unpatriotic, wouldn’t you? (I do that, but I think I get away with it)
Q: So is the high bandwidth consumption thing the only problem?
A: No! There are other considerations too, such as your server’s processor and memory usage. The more visitors you have, the more memory and CPU cycles are consumed. Too much and your site will start becoming very slow and unresponsive. It might even crash.
Wow! That almost sounds like a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack!
That’s exactly right! You can think of Google as being a potential source of DDOS attacks if you ALLOW your Google PageRank to get "too" high.
Q: OMFG! I had no idea! How does one jettison one’s Google PageRank when it gets too high?
A: Well now we’re getting to the meat of this article. The answer to ALL your high Google PageRank problems is to accept PAID TEXT LINKS and NOT USE the rel="nofollow" tag in your link markup.
Q: How does that work?
A: Well, you see Google has declared War on Paid Links. Here are two satisfied customers who enrolled in this "new" program recently with excellent results: Screw you Google! and Google kicks us in the guts!
Q: Those guys don’t sound too happy. What’s up with them?
A: Well I think what happened in their cases is that they were a little too successful. You see you want to scare off just a point or two but they went and scared off a whole lot of points!
Now see, what you gotta do is get hooked up on Google webmaster Central and then look at their webmaster tools. Here you can add all the web sites that you manage, and then if you do anything naughty, Google will send you a message to let you know that you have been found out. Then if you decide to fix things, you can ask them for reconsideraton once you’ve put things right.
You can also snitch out other people with the Report Spam and Report Paid Links links. So, there’s fun for everyone there.
Q: So what’s the bottom line here?
A: Do no evil, unless you’re Google… then it’s okay:
Google’s aim is to collect as much personal data as it could on individual users so that it could improve the quality of its search results
- TimesOnline: Google, who’s looking at you?
As of October 27, 2007, capetownnews.co.za inserted rel nofollow tags into all advertiser’s links to comply with Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Tags: Google PageRank loss, Matt Cutts, Paid links, Pay Per Post, Text Link Adverts, Web site adverts
Filed under Google PageRank, rel nofollow | 4 Comments »
