Movin’ on Up – Again and Again

Ok, so a few months ago, Google penalized me and I dropped from PR3, down to PR1. I don’t know why it happened, maybe I lost some links or something, but who cares. I am now back to PR3 and I’m a little confused. It’s been about 6 months, and I’m back where I began, with little or no new links.

My concern/question is this: Back when my site dropped from PR3 to PR1, I was aggressively obtaining links from other bloggers and directories. Once the reduction happened, I focused my linkbuilding efforts on other projects, and basically ignored my blog (aside from writing new posts and socializing them). I integrated several new plugins for ping.fm, Twitter, and a few others to notify the blogosphere of my updates. So needless to say, my blog has still been getting a buttload of traffic, which I like, it’s social media traffic, which I love; however, what I am trying to do is maintain and increase Google PR, but it’s pretty much impossible to do. Is it best to just do things the same way I am right now, or should I still be aggressively building links?

There are a few reasons why I think I was hit in the first place. I probably had links coming from spammy blogs, or spammy directories. I also installed the dofollow plugin, which caused PR to be passed from my homepage to other sites, so that could have impacted my overall PR. I also shifted the overall topical nature of my blog from being “All about web design and SEO” to “the adventures of Nick Norris.” So I think I may have become less of an authority in my niche. All of these reasons are possible and probable, but none of them bother me.

I think that Google PR is way overrated, and I don’t think it really proves anything; however, when you have good PR, it makes you look and feel cooler, and if you lose it, you look like a bum. Let’s hope that I can maintain my current PR and get it raised up to a PR5 before next year (wishful thinking, but don’t count me out).

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Tagged with: google • Nick Norris • pagerank • PR • pr1 • pr3 • pr5

Filed under: Search Engine Optimization

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