So a few days ago I got this email from a big corporation (I won’t name their name, but they run some SEO forums, design forums, script sites, hosting forums and more) asking me if I would be interested in buying some advertising.
here’s an excerpt of their email to me:
I have taken a look your web site. I find it to be well designed, easy to read, and easy to understand.
I have an opportunity that you might find interesting.
That opportunity would be in one of our Text Link sections, A Text Link in either section will put you on over 50k qualified pages. This will help you to increase your Google PageRank.
My response back was:
FYI, your sites don’t pass pagerank anymore – they were banned from passing pagerank long ago.
Years ago I used to advertise on this network…then suddenly my link text of "internet marketing" was sandwiched between "online gambling" and "online casinos"…I know what was coming, so we left them….a few months later they landed on the old "banned PR" list (this list was removed a few years ago).
Last year they wrote me and I told them they were nuts to have tons of gambling links on their sites and they’d never have a chance to get link juice back while they had these ads on thier site….in looking today, I no longer see these gambling sites listed…good….
…..but here’s some problems I found with their email to me.
#1 – NEVER mention PR or Pagerank in any emails….Bob was the first to show us this (you can’t buy pagerank), and he was just "forgiven" last week, after being banned for like 3-4 years.
#2 – I wonder if this was a mass emailed letter…the first line of "I have taken a look your web site. I find it to be well designed, easy to read, and easy to understand." is a crock of ….. I just wonder if you ran searches for things like "SEO" and scraped emails and sent them all this cookie cutter email….if so, you’ve just emailed Google (for you found the "google webmaster guildelines page" and you also found Matt’s blog….now you’ll never be forgiven…. like I said in #1, Don’t mention Pagerank"….sites have been bonked from google for mentioning things like this….so if they were talking about "relevant traffic", "click throughs", and "ad impressions", they’d be safer…but saying this will increase my pagerank will keep your site from ever passing link juice.
Did you know that you shouldn’t mention Pagerank in emails asking for links or advertising? Did you know that this could get you bonked from Google?…..if you didn’t , now you know.
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[tags]seo, search engine optimization, link building, links, google, pagerank, search engine marketing, sem, internet marketing[/tags]
9 Responses
iNET Interactive?
PageRank is still such a misunderstood term. I think most people think it is an indicator of your position in the SERP’s. When it is really just an indicator of how deep Google decides to crawl your site. But, that’s how email spammers like this one you got, take advantage of the term.
The pain is that people believe emails like these. And as much as I tell clients to forget about PageRank, that’s the thing a lot of them focus on. n And focus on almost exclusively (even more than actual serach engine rankings).
Next step conspiracy scenario: Googlebot searching blogs mentioning Pagerank and banning them!!! Scary eh? 😉
Occasionally I come across a mention regarding websites showing pagerank, but cut off from passing it.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t know how to spot a site that isn’t passing pagerank. Anyone willing to clue in the clueless?
Terry,
Read this post for your answer.
Thanks Jim. I guess I thought there was some magical SEO eyeball trick that could look at a site and say: Doesn’t pass pagerank.
Is it correct to say that the only way to know whether or not a site passes pagerank is to get a link placed on that site and then watch what happens?
And I apologize–I just realized I took things off track here.
I couldnt help but chuckle on this one.
Too bad about all the threats I got from websites who happened to be on the blockedpr list, that was one project that I really loved doing.
Hope life is Good Jim!
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