I’ve seen a lot of Bloggers drop their pagerank specially all those who command a lot of money from Text link advertising.

I was going to use this method in the long run to monetize my blog? I there a way to prevent google from dropping your PR by using this?

I would love to hear your views on this.

Cheers,
Carlo Selorio

Google must firmly believe that they do indeed “own” the web, to be so brazen as to try and manipulate the Internet community in this way. If I as an individual decide that I want to sell links on my site, then I will indeed do so and Google should really have no say in the matter at all. Of course if I am participating in one of their services such as Adsense then they could quite rightly object and indeed penalize me if they so desired but to blatantly punish sites in this way (PR or SERPs) is a mistake and a big one at that.

Where as Adsense is a product/service where you are directly associated with Google, their indexing and search is a service provided to all Internet users for the benefit of all and we as webmasters/bloggers provide them with the food to “feed the masses”, if we all just decided that we would stop using Adsense and Checkout etc.., block the Googlebots from indexing our content and switched to other service providers to fill the gaps, the quality score for returned search results on Google would be severely affectd as indeed would their bottom-line and as has happened in the past, users would look for an alternative.

No one entity should ever start believing that the Internet belongs to them, the whole idealism behind this paid links situation puts Google in the same light as Communism or the 3rd Reich, the attempt by Google to have Internet users inform on websites that employ paid links is reminiscent of Lenin’s Article 58 and the notion of the “enemy of the workers”, so what about and Matt Cutts is he Felix Dzerzhinsky?

All joking aside though, rather than try and intimidate webmasters into removing paid links and punishing them if they do not, if Google truly believe that these links are reducing the quality and relevance of their search results, instead of manually reducing PR or other qualitive measures, why don’t they manually apply the math associated with “nofollow” for these links instead.

The Internet is the biggest playground in the world and I think I see a bully striding accross it!

“Everyone has the right to be respected and the responsibility to respect others” – Bullying.org

I thought this was something valueable to learn and know it could be the cause of your PR penalty..

Please change all your “feature links” “sponsored links” to something else like “cool sites” or “resources” on your paid links and give those links a rel=”nofollow”..Something i learnt from matt cutts, while this may not be truth but it what he had mention before the massacre of dropping pageranks…
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

PR itself is the heart of Google’s original algorithm. It’s readily available online, and it’s not as sophisticated as some think. It seems very arbitrary in today’s world. I care a lot where I show up in the SERPs for my keyword, I care about PR only for such services as TLA. Yaro, have you seen any significant chnages in your major keywords for E-J?

If Google really wants to return the best results, they can’t penalize websites for trying to earn a living! Some of these sites they are penalizing have excellent content! There is no reason why another site which doesn’t sell links should receive a higher rank.

Jeff

Maybe the penalty is for how much sponsored links they have on their blog. I don’t know. As far as I know, I’m not affected and for a personal blog with a PR5 ranking, that’s pretty good on its own.

As some other bloggers state, RSS is the key metric (or personally I still think email subscribers is the most important, but RSS is very important too) and unless your blog is a search driven blog (like for example Darren’s original photography blog) then google dropping your rankings won’t hurt that much, unless as you say Andy, you need it for SEO proof for a product (which I will need eventually I suspect!).