Online Money Dot.com

Last October my Portuguese blog received a PageRank of 4. Unfortunately that didn´t last for long, and I quickly went back to a PR 0. I hadn´t done anything wrong on the blog, but Google, in its infinite wisdom, thought that I did. Several months went by and I never spent much time worrying if I had a PageRank of 0, 1, or 4. My main concern was, and is, to write interesting posts.

It just so happens that it seemed that recently I had started to drop in Google for keywords that I consider to be very important. That blog gets a lot of search engine traffic, and ranks well for very important keywords, like number one for “dinheiro”, which is Portuguese for “money”. It was at this time that I thought I need to do something.

Lets be clear, I could care less about the actual PageRank of my blog, but the perception that Google has of it, by giving me a PageRank of 0, is troublesome. Sooner or later, sites that Google sees as violating its guidelines will be penalized in the search rankings. Google, and Matt Cutts, have both said this much, its really just a question of time.

So I finally decided to write Google a letter and ask for forgiveness for any sins I might have committed. Pretty much like in the time of the Spanish inquisition, I confessed to sins I had not committed. Maybe admitting they had made a mistake, 4 days later Google gave me a PageRank of 3.

So here are the steps I had to follow in order to fall in Google´s good graces again

First go to your Google account and choose the “Webmasters Tools” option. If you haven´t done so, you can add the site to your account. You will also need to confirm that you are in fact the owner of the site. For this you will need to paste some code into the header of your site. The following step is the hard part.

Choose the option that says “Request Consideration”, and on the following page, choose the site you want to have reconsidered (see image).

Now check the box that says “By submitting this form, I acknowledge that:”. In other words, you are going to acknowledge that you did something wrong, even if that wasn´t the case, and you are going to promise that you will not do “it” again.

Your next step is to write a post explaining what you did, why you think you might have been penalized, and any steps you might have taken to remedy the situation.

In my “admission of guilt” I explained that had done a few paid posts, but those were a very small percentage of my total posts, and that they were done to publicize sites, and never with any specific anchor text. I also explained how all the paid link on my blog had the “nofollow” tag. You could figure this much just by looking at the price of these links, since at about $7 each I am only selling “traffic”, and at a great price at that.

All kidding aside, I recommend you spend some time on this text, and explain in detail what you might have done wrong, as well as all the steps you took to correct this. Google won´t answer your request directly, but if you see a positive change in your PageRank it means that it was “accepted”. Once again, and more important that your PageRank, it the importance of recovery any lost rankings in the search engines.