Pagerank is a ranking given by Google Search Engine for every page that is indexed by Google. Pagerank has importance for getting a good position on the Google SERPs. There are many factors which decide the SERPs, but I am not going to discuss those things as its out of scope for this post.
Last two pagerank updates have really slapped many bloggers with high pagerank. Google is against Paid Links and Paid Reviews. According to Google, web pages with high pagerank posting paid links which are not relevant to the content or website will effect the quality of the search results of their search engine. To discourage this, Google is penalizing such websites by reducing the pagerank of such websites. Johnchow was penalized for paid links and paid reviews. Same happened to many bloggers. Paid Links and Paid reviews are the best review generators for bloggers, but they get penalized if they are selling links. The only option to do post paid reviews and paid links is to use the rel=nofollow tag.
I was just doing some analysis of bloggers who were effected by the pagerank penality, for example, Johnchow who is earning around US$30,000/- a month is still earning the same even though his pagerank is on 3 now which was 6 earlier.
How do combat pagerank penalty?
Once you are penalized by Google, then getting traffic from Google is something very rare. I am sure that the traffic share from Google must have reduced tremendously. But I see lots of Adwords campaign going on for his blog. He spends around US$ 400 every month on this and should be getting good traffic from that. He already has 25,000 subscribers and he has news letters which again keeps his traffic going.
Other option to carry on with paid links and paid reviews is to use the rel=nofollow tag, but the rates will not be same when you provide a link which can enhance the search engine ranking.
My advice to bloggers is not to go against the Terms of Google as Google is the best and free traffic provider. There is no alternative yet for Google. You can monetize your blog by other means like Google adsense or sell private ads with the rel=nofollow tag.
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