Just under a month ago I made a post about how I had just discovered that this blog was apparently suffering from the dreaded “Giigle PR0 penalty” virus that’s been hitting many blogs suspected by the BigG of selling text links.

feb 6th : Google PR0 Penalty

As I’ve never sold any links on this blog I came to the conclusion that it must be because I have a fairly long list of “useful resources” links in my blogroll, non of which had the Rel=”nofollow” link, as it’s not an option in the standard WordPress installation.

I went hunting for a solution and the post included a video on how to hack your WP files to add a “nofollow” tick box option for blogroll links, thanks to Zain of KnowledgeConstructs.com

I realised at the time that while this was an “ok” solution for someone like myself, who’s not totally terrifed (I’m just a little bit nervous) by the prospect of messing around in the wordpress pages code, for the vast majority of wordpress bloggers this solution is against the principle of why they use WP in the first place, they want a simple web site system that doesn’t involve messing around with code and potentially “breaking” things.

Fortunatly I know a pretty damned good WP coder, who’s working on some new plugins for me, and she was able to knock up a much better solution for me to offer as a free plugin, so thanks to Riki!

I installed the plugin and tested it out, and it worked exactly as promised, as I said, Riki is good, it tool her less than 3 hours to send the completed plugin back to me..

so I made a post announcing the new plugin here on Feb 26th:
BlogTactics NoFollow BlogRoll Plugin

and you can grab your free copy from the Plugins page http://blogtactics.com/plugins/

Now here’s the bit that has surprised me, and is the main reason for this post…

the pagerank for this blog is back.

Ok, it’s dropped from PR3 to PR2, but here’s the bit that has me surprised: -

I didn’t get around to doing a “re-inclusion request” with google, which is apparently (according to what I’ve read on other blogs, including stuff posted by Matt Cutts  himself), what you need to do to get the PR re-instated when you get a PR0 penalty.

Now I’m not going to claim to know why it’s happened that way, and whilst I’d love to claim that it’s all down to my new “nofollow” plugin, I’ve got no “hard” evidence to prove that, other than the “circumstantial” evidence from the fact that this was the only change I’ve made to the blog..

oh, and the fact that my “pesonal” blog that got hit with a PR0 at the same time, and I also installed the plugin on, has also also got it’s PR back., with no “re-inclusion request”.

you’ll just have to make up your own mind, but if you want to grab a copy of the “nofollow” plugin, feel free to do so, and there’s a quick video to show you how it works, it’s pretty simple.

http://blogtactics.com/plugins/

Tags: Blogging

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