Cleaning Out Old Paid Entries
Filed in Make Money Blogging
This site covers how to start a blog, build traffic and make money blogging. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
As most of us know by now, Google doesn’t like paid links that don’t invoke the rel=”nofollow” tag. Many folks who’d been blogging for the money saw their PageRank reduced (or taken away completely) during the last two PR updates. More than a few have decided — as I did — to completely sever all ties with a certain Pay People to Post site (ahem), but they still haven’t seen their PR ratings restored.
Well, here are a few steps to help you fix that:
1. The particular company in question required, almost without exception, that posters insert an invisible tracking image in their paid entries. To find yours, search your old entries using img src=”http://tinyurl.com as your search filter.
2. Under the company’s Terms of Service you aren’t required to keep the entry after 30 days, anyway, so you have the option to delete it if that time has passed.
3. If you choose not to delete the entries, then remove the tracking code at the bottom and add rel=”nofollow” into the attribute of the paid link. So, [a href=”http://www.somedomain.com”]paid anchor text[/a] would become [a href=”http://www.somedomain.com” rel=”nofollow”]paid anchor text[/a] (or, better yet, whatever words you want to use now).
4. Then, sign into Google Webmaster Tools and request reconsideration of your site.
Good luck!
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Make Money Blogging. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
More like this:
- None Found
6 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Subscribe to Feed- Subscribe to Comments
- Get updates via email:
Need help?
- Ask Kate!
- Spiff Up Your Site
- What I’ve Blogged This Week
- Cut And Paste Cleanly
- Another Profitable Month
- Search Engines Serving A Charitable Purpose
- A Snooze Button For Your Email
- What’s In A Captcha? Lots, Actually
- The Lazy Blogger
- Thanks For All The Fish!
- How To Find A Good Hosting Company
- Blog Better (Blogging 401)
- Blogger Toolbox
- Building Traffic (Blogging 201)
- Design Matters (Blogging 301)
- From The Management
- Make Money Blogging
- Morning Must Read
- Starting a blog (Blogging 101)
- Technology Beyond Blogging
- Write better
- Writing Prompts
- Writing reviews
- Electric Venom
- I Think Therefore I Blog
- Queen of Snark
Top Commenters
That’s what I’ve been doing… though I may go back to paid posting, I’m just taking a break and doing some work under the hood, so to speak.
OH, and thanks for the post about the nofollow tags! I’d never seen it explained clearly, and some of it still has to sink in, but I very much appreciate the clarifications.
You found the perfect niche; love your posts!
pam’s last blog post..?Calm down?
I’m glad you spelled it out. Although you already did for me, I really was clueless on the request reconsideration thing. I plead ignorance cuz it’s the honest reason.
jae’s last blog post..Sick Day
Whew! 3 more left to do but I gotta wait until I get paid for them. They’re BIG payouts! After those 3, I’ll ask for reconsideration. Thanks for the tutorial, especially the filter part. Of course, that never crossed my mind. Stamp an L on me.
Lori’s last blog post..A Question from a Reader–Serious comments only
I did this on MomReviews and never heard back from Google about the reconsideration. I guess I could try again.
What about new paid posts? We would be violating that company’s TOS if we put “nofollow” into the URLs, correct?
Elizabeth’s last blog post..Laughing Baby video
I don’t know that Google actually responds to each request, aside from either restoring the PR or not. If I recall correctly, they advise folks to wait around 6-8 weeks. If that time has passed, you might want to resubmit.
But if there are “new paid posts” as you wrote in your comment then your site would still be in violation of Google’s ban on paid links lacking the “nofollow” tag, so they wouldn’t restore PR, period.
As far as the “nofollow” tag and that company, it’s my understanding that using the tag when writing a paid review violates their TOS. (Which means that, yes, they’re paying you to violate Google’s policy.)
I am considering doing that. I don’t want to remove old posts but will be adding the no follow tag.
Adam’s last blog post..Valentine’s ecard virus