Protecting or regaining your Google PageRank with meta tags

If you are a blogger that accepts paid posts or paid reviews, you have either experienced or will experienced Google’s policy of wiping your PageRank to zero. I have seen several methods posted on other blogs for counteracting this issue. The most notable of these methods has been to cave completely to Google and ad rel=”nofollow” to all sponsored links. While this method will work, it isn’t a real help to those of us who depend on paid posts or paid reviews for a revenue while we’re waiting for numbers large enough to drive affiliate sales.

The next most effective method was spelled out by Andy Beard, and included using a robots.txt file to limit the posts that Google indexes. While this method works perfectly well, there are issues involved, especially for people who aren’t all that familiar with updating this file or are uncomfortable doing so. It also has the inherent issue of having to update two files for each and every post that contains a paid advertising link, something that can seriously add to a bloggers workload, which is something I avoid at all costs.

I wanted a method I could use on a post-by-post basis to keep Google happy and to keep advertisers happy, and I think I’ve managed to do so in just a few easy steps In WordPress. I’m not sure how to do this on other platforms, but I’m sure there’s something available for your specific blogging tool of choice if you dig around enough.

1. Verify your blog with Google by using the Verification tool at Google Webmaster Tools. This step is crucial if your blog has already been penalized.
2. Download and install a plugin that allows you to modify meta tags on a per-post basis. I used the MetaTagz plugin by Brandon Buttars, but there are others available, take your pick here just as long as the plugin allows you to modify the robots meta tag.
3. In each and every post you have with a sponsored link, or a link that looks like it might be a sponsored link, modify your robots meta tag to look like this:

   <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />

   This tells the Google spiders to avoid indexing the page or follow any link on that page. Other spiders may or may not honor this tag, but Google is the only spider we’re worried about in this instance.

   Be sure to modify the robots tag on each new paid post!

If you haven’t already had rank lowered or removed by Google you should be all right at this point. If you have had rank penalized or removed, run over and file a reinclusion request. In my case it took about a week to see results, but my main site is now back up to a happy PR4. The nice thing about that ws that the blog only had a PR3 when they hit it!

As I said, I only know how to do this for a Wordpress powered blog. If anyone out there knows how to pull this off using another platform, let me know and I’ll add the instructions here, or just give me a link and I’ll do the legwork.

Peace!

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