How to lose your Google PageRank in ONE easy step! Q & A

Posted on October 28th, 2007 by Richard Catto 2,201 views

I keep seeing people asking this question all over the Blogosphere – how does one get rid of one’s Google PageRank?

See, the problem is that sites with a high Google PageRank (7+) get a LOT OF "FREE" TRAFFIC from Google.

Q: Why?

A: Because their URLs appear high up in organic search engine results pages (SERPs) which leads to lots of people clicking them and arriving at those sites. That causes lots of bandwidth to be consumed and if you’re hosted in South Africa that is a BAD THING!

Q: Why?

A: Because bandwidth is very expensive in South Africa.

Q: So why not host elsewhere where bandwidth is cheap, like in the United States?

A: Well you could do that but then you’d be very unpatriotic, wouldn’t you? (I do that, but I think I get away with it)

Q: So is the high bandwidth  consumption thing the only problem?

A: No! There are other considerations too, such as your server’s processor and memory usage. The more visitors you have, the more memory and CPU cycles are consumed. Too much and your site will start becoming very slow and unresponsive. It might even crash.

Wow! That almost sounds like a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack!

That’s exactly right! You can think of Google as being a potential source of DDOS attacks if you ALLOW your Google PageRank to get "too" high.

Q: OMFG! I had no idea! How does one jettison one’s Google PageRank when it gets too high?

A: Well now we’re getting to the meat of this article. The answer to ALL your high Google PageRank problems is to accept PAID TEXT LINKS and NOT USE the rel="nofollow" tag in your link markup.

Q: How does that work?

A: Well, you see Google has declared War on Paid Links. Here are two satisfied customers who enrolled in this "new" program recently with excellent results: Screw you Google! and Google kicks us in the guts!

Q: Those guys don’t sound too happy. What’s up with them?

A: Well I think what happened in their cases is that they were a little too successful. You see you want to scare off just a point or two but they went and scared off a whole lot of points!

Now see, what you gotta do is get hooked up on Google webmaster Central and then look at their webmaster tools. Here you can add all the web sites that you manage, and then if you do anything naughty, Google will send you a message to let you know that you have been found out. Then if you decide to fix things, you can ask them for reconsideraton once you’ve put things right.

You can also snitch out other people with the Report Spam and Report Paid Links links. So, there’s fun for everyone there.

Q: So what’s the bottom line here?

A: Do no evil, unless you’re Google… then it’s okay:

Google’s aim is to collect as much personal data as it could on individual users so that it could improve the quality of its search results
- TimesOnline: Google, who’s looking at you?

As of October 27, 2007, capetownnews.co.za inserted rel nofollow tags into all advertiser’s links to comply with Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Tags: Google PageRank loss, Matt Cutts, Paid links, Pay Per Post, Text Link Adverts, Web site adverts
Filed under Google PageRank, rel nofollow |

4 Responses to “How to lose your Google PageRank in ONE easy step! Q & A”

1. Steve Hayes Says:
   October 28th, 2007 at 07:03

   I used to host my web pages on Yahoo/Geocities — outside South Africa, so I’m unpatriotic, but most visitors come from the USA anyway.

   Then in May 2006 Yahoo “lost” my pages. They vanished from the web, and I couldn’t get into the site to edit them.

   After a week I moved my pages to another US free provider, Bravehost, and notified Google and other search engines.

   Google, however, continued to list the old pages at Geocities, which were inaccessible.

   After two months, however, the Geocities pages were “found” again, but in the meantime they hadn’t been updated. I didn’t want to update two sets of pages, so I updated them with “No follow” and “No robots”, and said many of the links to other pages to the ones on the Bravehost site.

   But 18 months later Google STILL shows the Geocities pages on a search, and the others are in the “Results similar but not shown”.

2. Richard Catto Says:
   October 28th, 2007 at 07:51

   Click here and your problems are over:

   Removing my content from the Google index

3. Candy Tothill Says:
   October 28th, 2007 at 14:05

   This is a really helpful and enlightening piece of information Rich. I’m so happy to be able to leave all the web management stuff to you now. I love that you are complying with a code of ethics and I think it’ll mean a lot to your readers, advertisers and other stakeholders. I think that you’re setting a standard that lots of other people will want to follow. I love it when you use your power for good

4. Sire Says:
   October 28th, 2007 at 20:52

   Nice article, but I don’t think I was all that upset, I was just trying to relate how I thought most webmasters felt. Your “Google kicks us in the guts” title may have got more of a response though. Maybe I should change the title of my post.;)

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