BloggerVenue

The adventure of making money online!

December 3, 2008 | 46 comments | Featured, Google Adsense

Did i just got Slapped by Google?

Today i received an email about an advertising offer that i was negotiating in the past days, and in the mail the sender alerted me for the fact that Bloggervenue.com lost its Page Rank! I said “what the hell!?!?” and immediately checked my page rank and it was true!!!! Holy crap!

Many of you don’t give a damn about page rank but i learned to value my page rank 3 (at first) and the page rank 2 until recently.

I really don’t know why i lost my PR…. well, maybe i do know, but there is no way to prove what was the reason. Perhaps google bot detected link ads? i really don’t know.

Well, i lost the page rank, but i investigated a little more and saw that i lost almost half of my backlinks! Bloggervenue.com had almost 10,000 backlinks but now it is little more than 5,000 backlinks! This is a major difference!

This never happened to me so i am a bit lost. How can i loose almost 5000 backlinks so fast? Does any one have an explanation for this?

Have this happened to you before? How did you get through all of this?

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46 Comments »

Comment by Shane
2008-12-03 17:06:57

Is that backlinks as reported by Google or by Yahoo? Google’s backlinks reporting is notoriously incomplete.

Shane's lastest..Very Cool Flickr Story
Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-04 00:40:07

it is yahoo backlinks…. google backlinks fails to satisfy me…. lol

 
 
2008-12-03 18:46:13

that would have hurt , but I guess thats how Google operates..get crazy on link building

ZK@Internet Marketing Blog's lastest..November Blog Update
Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-04 00:41:43

yah….. i won’t bother to much… i use a natural link building method so it will take time….

 
 
Comment by Dennis Edell Subscribed to comments via email
2008-12-03 22:19:47

Damn dude. I have no idea, but please follow up if you figure it out.

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-04 00:43:05

Iwill try to figure it out for sure

 
 
Comment by Nishadha
2008-12-04 04:03:25

If you haven’t done anything to piss off Google I wouldn’t worry too much about the loss of page rank. Most probable they are tweaking algorithms and your PR will be back to normal in few weeks. Loss of Yahoo back links is scary though , maybe its just temporary :)

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-05 03:26:48

probably not temporary…. i need to focus on link building again….

 
 
Comment by Gini
2008-12-04 09:34:39

Okay I think something weird is going on… It looks like I lost my page rank too, and I was expecting it go up. My traffic has gone up 250%+ over the last three months and I have much more backlinks than the last page rank update. Lets hope that this is just a glitch that will be fixed soon.

 
Comment by Gini
2008-12-04 09:36:35

See, now I just checked using a different tool and it says that my PR hasn’t changed. This must be a glitch.

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-04 15:27:26

no luck for me… still no PR and still don’t know what happened to the 5000 backlinks that disappeared…. :\

 
 
Comment by Erwin Tan
2008-12-04 09:51:18

The system is really crazy. It’s like the current economy situation.

One moment you are up there and another moment anything can happen.

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-04 15:27:54

true… specially if it comes from google

 
 
2008-12-04 11:41:49

I just lost the PR on my high traffic site. I did sell some links but it was not too many -_-

Blogging from Scratch's lastest..Hello, world!
Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-04 15:30:11

i sold some links from a specific company that hasn’t been target by google yet…. it seems things changed… just cashed out all my money from them and im deciding if i should continue to use them or not.

 
Comment by Dennis Edell Subscribed to comments via email
2008-12-04 15:59:29

One will do it if - err - when they catch it.

 
 
2008-12-04 23:49:04

You either got caught selling links, or the link loss caused the change

You can lose backlinks that fast if they came from the top commentator widget on blogs and then u stop commenting and lose those links

Comment by Dennis Edell Subscribed to comments via email
2008-12-05 17:58:06

Simon - I thought that was how you lost in Technorati…Yahoo too?

 
 
Comment by Dean
2008-12-05 04:00:15

That is interesting to hear.

My page rank dropped from 4 to 2, I didn’t have that many backlinks (certainly nothing like what you still have) I must see if I have any left :O

 
Comment by Mike @ Webkinz (2)
2008-12-05 07:04:22

Probably some backlinks wasn’t good ones. Of course selling links could make the effect too.

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-05 21:04:35

the backlinks i had came from trusted sites, so i don’t think the problem came from backlinks quality.

It must all be because of link selling

 
 
Comment by Abhishek
2008-12-05 10:39:26

Its not new stuff if you are found selling links as ads

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-05 21:04:55

that is true.

 
 
Comment by Ajith Edassery
2008-12-05 13:27:12

I did not loose my homepage PR but lost PR on a lot of internal pages… to make it worst, I lost a lot of backlinks as reported by Google.

This has happened to many people in the past couple of weeks or three.

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-05 21:05:41

what is the site or software you use to check internal page rank?

 
 
Comment by Chetan
2008-12-05 18:20:32

Yesterday google did a minor PR update, this must be effect of that. Currently my blog is new, hope so it will get a good pr this update.

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-11 11:29:28

i hope so :)
i must put into practice some techniques to help increase my page rank

 
 
Comment by A Digital Nomad
2008-12-05 22:19:43

That sucks to hear your Pagerank went down. Perhaps it is a minor glitch in one of the data centers and it will return in the upcoming days. Other than that, I wonder why they would remove a pagerank like that so suddenly.

A Digital Nomad's lastest..Map Out Blog Posts With Google Maps
Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-11 11:30:19

it odesn’t seem to be a glitch… but whatever… life goes on :)

 
 
Comment by Keith
2008-12-06 01:52:24

Sad to hear your story. I suspect it could be due to some sites which you usually submit your links delete your account or all your links.

Below is a very good tool to check Internal Page Rank and other stuff

http://seoanalytic.com/tools/

 
Comment by Nihar
2008-12-06 11:46:19

Its sad to see that you lost the page rank. I don’t know why it happens. I am new to your blog. Will be around in future.

 
Comment by Ben Pei
2008-12-07 03:49:36

Linkbuilding is a continous process.. It either goes up or drops, it doesnt stay there. So, if you stop working on it, you will probably see it drop and sometimes it drops drastically.

Ben Pei's lastest..Blogging With One Hand
 
Comment by Stephan Miller
2008-12-07 04:42:45

I have visited a few blogs today saying the same thing had happened to them. So it seems that you are not alone. But it sucks just the same. I did go through this once when I only had one domain and 50% of my total income came from the site. I just had to start over.

 
Comment by Ned Carey Subscribed to comments via email
2008-12-08 07:06:17

Top commenter - these often reset every month. If you were top commenter last month and this month didn’t comment you would lose that link.

Blog roll- blog rolls are usually listed on every page of a site. This means that if you lose one blog roll link you may lose thousands of links from one large site. However I am sure multiple links from one site have diminishing returns. This same effect could happen with top commenter if it is on every page.

Google might stop reporting links from bad neighborhoods that link to you.

Some sites close down.

Some links are temporary.

If you are using Google’s Webmaster tools to check links, it seems quite inconsistent. Several people including me reported that they lost all their links. Mine showed up a few days later.

I like to down load the list of links in Webmaster tools and put them in a spreadsheet to compare month to month.

Google has a a video that says they use over 200 criteria IN ADDITION to page rank to rate your site. Are you still coming up in searches for keywords?

Keep us posted if you find out why.

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-11 11:32:04

i don’t check my backlinks from google. I use the tool provided from a site that is quite accurate….

 
 
2008-12-08 07:40:37

I have found yahoo backlinks to be a bit up and down of late. I did a check of my website and yahoo showed that i had NO backlinks. Maybe it’s a glitch with yahoo ?

Jason

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-11 11:39:14

yeah that happens regularly, so i seems, but in my case that’s not the reason why i lost backlinks. I see that some blogs where i had backlinks went offline. So that explains some losses

 
 
Comment by Ruby Web
2008-12-09 12:14:08

I have no idea how the hell that could have happened. Maybe you had most of your backlinks from domains that Google regards as bad, or you had more than one backlink per domain and they just decided to count the domain and not the number of backlinks per that link. I don’t know, just a thought.

Comment by Hugo Santos
2008-12-11 15:06:08

one of the reasons i have found is that some sites that were linking to me went offline :\

 
 
Comment by laser
2008-12-11 18:21:27

Dang, best of luck with the recovery process.

I’ve learned a ton just reading the comments to this post.

 
Comment by Blog for Beginners Subscribed to comments via email
2008-12-14 06:11:12

Hey Hugo

Have you found out what actually happened? It’s kinda puzzling to me too that you could just lost your backlinks out of nowhere. I couldn’t think of any possible reason that could have happened.

Yan

Blog for Beginners's lastest..By: Yan
 
2008-12-15 13:22:43

I didn’t realize there was a PR update. I know when I checked my backlinks the other day that I lost all my Yahoo links, but when I checked some other blogs including problogger I noticed that they lost theirs as well so I presumed it was just a glitch. Has your come back yet?

Sire@Blogging For Fame & Fortune's lastest..Increase Return Commentators With A Simple Plugin
 
Comment by The Deal Is Subscribed to comments via email
2008-12-16 18:13:58

This has happened to us, recently. No big deal. We came back bigger in just 2 weeks. Still don’t know the reason.

 
Comment by Jack Clarke
2008-12-28 23:16:59

Same thing happened to me on a weight reduction site, it mysteriously went from a PR 4 to a 2 and a loss of hundreds of backlinks.

 
Comment by mdnl
2008-12-31 05:49:34

I feel your pain man, Google just dropped my PR on both my sites and I lost a lot of backlinks in yahoo and in Google my links have dropped to just 6, where it was pages of links before :(

 
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