After 3 months, Google gave me a PageRank of ‘3′, this was fantastic since I was new.

Another 9 months went by and suddenly I had a PageRank of ‘5′, it only latest for about a week, and then I dropped back to a PageRank of ‘3′, another victim of the Google Dance.

However, 6 months ago I lost all of my PageRank, overnight it was gone. I was dumbfounded, no idea why it had happened.

I was doing everything I thought was proper and by the books. Something had penalized me. I was being indexed by Google but they seemed to have turned on me.

What I did:

• I did a complete overhaul of Pliggs, new design, got rid of all ads except Adsense.
• Ensured all images had the ‘alt’ tag
• Made sure all outbound links in my posts were using anchor tags
• Commented more on other blogs
• Removed all widgets from the blog (EntreCard etc…)

I have released numerous FREE templates for Pligg, they have been downloaded thousands of times.  This must relate to a lot of backlinks.  Wrong.  There are a few things that a lot of downloads of my templates mean:

• Not everyone will keep the backlink in the footer
• Not every download relates to a live website
• Not every website using my template has PageRank.

So, as an example lets say I have 2000 downloads(which I have), 25% of them are not live, 25% of them are not live and 25 % of them remove the backlink, this leave 25% that should be active.  Lets go further and say half are indexed by Google.

So, 125 backlinks from the 2000 downloads, which is low-balling, this is evident by looking at the numbers in my sidebar of the downloads, I still have no PageRank.

According to Backlink Watch, I have 1000 backlinks, upon studying the list, not one of those backlinks are passing on any PR juice.  However, upon even further studying I note that no backlinks are from a site using my templates.  Google does show sites using them though, and a few have PageRank, so wheres the PR love from Google?  Who knows.

Some of the websites using my themes with PageRank:

• Entreview - PR1
• Indonesian Circle - PR2
• Linka-me - PR1

While these sites have very little PageRank, and there are more with PageRank, I still do not understand my loss of it, maybe a decrease, but a total loss?

PageRank is a reflection of the number of backlinks to your website and the PageRank value of those websites and whether ‘bad neighbours’ are linking to you.

I have plenty of backlinks, no ‘bad neighbours’ I know of and fresh content, but no love.

I have come to the realization that beating myself up with this issue is over, I can no longer focus on what I did wrong but what I did right.  I have done almost all SEO tips I know of and have plenty of backlinks.

I will continue to produce FREE Pligg templates and posts and maybe someday I will be rewarded by Google, but from here on in, PageRank is the last thing on my mind and I have even gotten rid of the Google toolbar from my Firefox.

If you have any insight or a familiar story to share, please leave me a comment below.

What is your new PageRank now that the last 2008 update was complete a couple of days ago?

Related posts:

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If you know of one not mentioned, please leave a comment below and we will add it to the list.

7706 Unique Visitors

A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website

There’s a method behind StumbleUpon’s madness

How Important Is StumbleUpon?

5000 Stumbles And Counting

8 Reasons I Prefer StumbleUpon

Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic Than Digg

StumbleUpon Takes A Lesson From Digg, Starts Banning Users

Targeting StumbleUpon Users

HOW TO: Get the Most Out of StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon: Exposure That Lasts

The Secret To Massive Digg/StumbleUpon Traffic Without Spamming

28 Tips To Make You a StumbleUpon Superstar

How to increase StumbleUpon traffic?

Making a Power Account On StumbleUpon

How StumbleUpon Works

Writing for StumbleUpon

Build Super Links and Traffic With StumbleUpon

A Quick Traffic Driving Tip With StumbleUpon

How to Use StumbleUpon Like a Pro

StumbleUpon the Best Pages on the Web

Centralizing Your Social World

How to Draw StumbleUpon Users Into Your Blog

Boost Your StumbleUpon Traffic with Outbound Links

The Magic of StumbleUpon’s Recent Reviews Page

Building Your Blog With StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon Traffic Bounce Rate is Amazing

The Secret Features of StumbleUpon

What Makes StumbleUpon Unique?

Getting Started With StumbleUpon - Using the Toolbar

How Important Is StumbleUpon?

Rethinking Links

Using StumbleUpon to Increase Blog Traffic

5 Top Resources for Stumblers Outside of StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a Goldmine For Writers

StumbleUpon Visitors Not Identified By Analytics

StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Traffic

3 StumbleUpon Traffic Myths Debunked

Building a Large Audience for Your StumbleUpon Account

StumbleUpon Gamed By Paid-To-Stumble Service

Lingering Taste of StumbleUpon Traffic

Beginner’s Guide To StumbleUpon

Is StumbleUpon Traffic Worth Getting?

How to Increase StumbleUpon Traffic?

Revealed: 16 Different Personality Types of StumbleUpon Users

StumbleUpon Mathematics for Stumblers

Increase Your StumbleUpon Network

25 Reasons You Get Thumbs Up

Before Submitting Your Story Make Sure That…

Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic Than Digg

How To Set Up A Domino Effect of Traffic

The Why, How and Who of Marketing on StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon vs. Digg - Sharing Traffic

My StumbleUpon Friend

StumbleUpon Launches Stumble-Thru Site Specific Stumbling

How Do You Become A StumbleUpon Power User?

StumbleUpon Quintuplet From The king Of Blogging Gobshites

StumbleUpon Is Your Trump

StumbleUpon’s Fantastic Ability to Drive Traffic

How To Run A Successful StumbleUpon Advertising Account

Writing For StumbleUpon

How to Get StumbledUpon

The StumbleUpon Experiment

ADDED December 22, 2008

Stumble Upon for targeted traffic - Part 1 - The MYTHS

Stumble Upon for targeted traffic - Part 2 - Get better results

Stumble Upon for targeted traffic - Part 3 - Some odd Stumbles that got extremely popular

40+ things how to get targeted traffic from Stumble Upon (SU series - Part 4)

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Logos:

SimWebSol - web 2.0 logo creator

LogoCreatr

Logo Blog

Web 2.0 Logo Creator

Icons:

WebAppers Web Application set

Knob toolbar icons

Monofactor Icon Set

Diagona Icons

DryIcon Simplistica

FamFamFam

Rinoa Icons

Circular Icons

RSS Feed Icons:

FastIcon Smashing Feed Icons

Design Freak RSS Icons

Kurumizawa

Social Media Icons:

Vikiworks

AODesign

DevilCry

Rounded Corners:

Spiffy Box

RoundedCornr

CSS Round Corners

CSS Teaser Box

Image Editors:

Dr. Pic

Animated GIFs

My Imager

Photoshop

Pixenate

Pixlr

Snipshot

Buttons:

Adam Kalsey
Button Boost
Chicklet Creator

Navigation/Menus:

List -o- Matic
List -u- Like
Tabs Generator

explodingboy

Favicons:

Favicon Generator
DeGraeve
Favicon.cc

Optimizers:

Online CSS Optimizer

Clean CSS

Code Beautifier

HTML Optimizer

HTML Tidy

Image Optimizer

Online Image Optimizer

There are thousands of online utilities to help with web development, this is a list of the services we have used and think are worthy of being mentioned.

If you know of any other service we have missed, please let us know by leaving a comment.

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Pligg member fhelik came up with the solution by adding reCaptcha on step 2, this however isn’t the ideal place for it to be, the reason being, most of your spam is being submitted by a bot.  Once the bot registers an account, it then attempts to submit a submission, once it hits step 2, it will be blocked because of the reCaptcha, but what you are left with is an incomplete story submission that will show up in your “Upcoming” section.

Using fhelik, I simply modified it and added it to step 1, this way if it’s a bot doing the story submission, it won’t make it past submitting a URL, and it will prevent incomplete submissions from littering my “Upcoming” pages.

Backup each file before installing this module

I have this installed on Pligg v9.9.5, a demo can be seen at FAQ PAL.

Step 1: open submit_step_1.tpl

Find:

{if $Submit_Require_A_URL neq 1}{#PLIGG_Visual_Submit_Editorial#}{/if}

before, add:

{php}
require_once('recaptchalib.php');
$publickey = "PUBLICKEY"; // you got this from the signup page
echo recaptcha_get_html($publickey);
{/php}

Step 2: open submit.php

Find:

// submit step 1
function do_submit1() {
global $main_smarty, $db, $dblang, $current_user, $the_template;

after, add:

//captcha
if(enable_captcha == 'true') {

require_once('recaptchalib.php');
// Get a key from http://recaptcha.net/api/getkey
$publickey = "PUBLICKEY";
$privatekey = "PRIVATEKEY";

# the response from reCAPTCHA
$resp = null;
# the error code from reCAPTCHA, if any
$error = null;

# was there a reCAPTCHA response?
if ($_POST["recaptcha_response_field"]) {
$resp = recaptcha_check_answer ($privatekey,
$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"],
$_POST["recaptcha_challenge_field"],
$_POST["recaptcha_response_field"]);

if ($resp->is_valid) {
echo "Succesfully verified that you are human.";
} else {
# set the error code so that we can display it
$error = $resp->error;

}
}

if (!$resp->is_valid) { // if incorrect captcha code was entered
$main_smarty->assign('register_error_text', "badcode");
$main_smarty->display($the_template . '/submit_errors.tpl');
return;
}
// fin capthca

Find:

}

// submit step 2
function do_submit2() {

Replace, with:

}}

// submit step 2
function do_submit2() {

Download the latest reCaptcha library from here and upload to your “root”. 

You will also need reCaptcha keys for your site, you will need to register and add your site to reCaptcha.  Register here.

If the user/bot fails to enter the correct reCaptcha code, they will be forwarded to your error page controlled by submit_errors.tpl, I have not come with a custom error message for this, maybe someone can submit one.

This should eliminate almost all spam submissions.

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You can win $100 cash, 2 FlashEff Premium, 2 Premium Themes, 3000 EC’s & more, why wouldn’t you enter.

Prizes:

First Prize:
One FlashEff Premium license - worth $150 from Jumpeye Components
One Premium Theme of your choice with personal license at Premium Themes
Unlimited Reseller Hosting Plan for a year a Infogle

Second Prize:
One FlashEff Premium license - worth $150 from JumpeyeComponents.com
One Premium Theme of your choice with personal license at PremiumThemes.net
5GB

Third Prize:
$100 Cash prize via Paypal fro Photoshop tutorials

Fourth Prize:
A Website review worth $25 and a 125×125 ad space for a month at N Speaks
1000 EntreCard credits and one 125×125

Fifth Prize:
2000 EntreCard

Sixth Prize:
One 125×125

You only have until December 27th to enter.

Enter here…

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3. How does 70000 Entrecard credits sound? We thought our contest for 10000 credits was good, but...

Do you own or have you seen one worthy to be included?  If so, we want to see it, leave a comment below with the url and we will check it out, if it passes the test, we’ll had it to the list.

If the site uses the default template, like most do, don’t bother submitting it.

Newzly

Accepted by over 60000 unique visitors as the best source for information, latest breaking news / blog posts and top news headline updates from India and the world covering business, politics, science, sports, bollywood etc …

Dealigg

Deals: Dell Home Small Business, Amazon, Buy.com, Staples Coupons and Promotion Codes, Free After Rebate Items, updated hourly.

Earners Club

Earners Club is a social bookmarking site about internet marketing and making money online. Discover and share tips and resources about internet marketing, making money online and blogging.

Openfaves

Latest news, breaking news, top videos and images, feature stories and more around the web.It’s the best way to discover the things you like on the web.

Deal Shouter

DealShouter is an online deals, bargains and coupons sharing website where users submit the money-saving discount offers they have found. The best deals are highlighted and sorted based on users votes. If you are a bargain hunter in who needs to find good deals or let others know about hot deals, Dealshouter is the place to be. You’ll find here deals on electronic products, computers, clothing and more.

Tip’d

Tip’d is a community for financial news, ideas, and tips.

Blog Engage

Blog Engage is a Web 2.0 Social Networking website for bloggers!

FAQ PAL

FAQ PAL is a website to find and submit tutorials for webmasters, developers, coders and surfers.

Hot Aphrodite
Adult Pligg site. (NSFW!)

Blogsvine

Blogsvine is a user generated, revenue sharing, blog bookmarking and blog post rating website. Anyone can submit their blogs or blog posts for free and earn Adsense Revenue.

Post On Fire
PostOnFire is a social bookmarking service for bloggers & blog readers.

Can your site beat these?

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Over the past 12 months there hasn’t much development, released that is, except for contributions by Pligg members and the several paid modules which in my opinion have taken a higher spot of the list of priorities for the development team.  I blogged about one module that was released, but it definitely wasn’t tested properly prior to the release.

However, it now appears that the development team has found their second wind and have big plans for the popular and quite possibly best Digg clone.  They have released some information about the upcoming release of Pligg 1.0 and it looks good.

One of the biggest changes that will definitely change Pligg forever and also increase it’s possibilities is a “Group” function.  This has been sought after by numerous Pligg sites.  As you can imagine, this is a major coding feat and will enhance the experience you can offer your users and will attract more users to register at your site.  It has been highly successful at Mixx and can broaden your network of friends.

Pligg has also changed their default theme, thank god!  It now looks more inviting and professional.  This however doesn’t mean that you should use it, I am not a big fan of using the default theme in any CMS or blogging script, sites need to stand out.  However, perhaps this new theme can be used with some modifications to make it more unique to you.

I am patiently waiting to see what other changes are in store for Pligg 1.0.  They are not saying when this version will be released.

Get full details over at their blog…

In this case I must congratulate the developers for a job well done, providing they actually deliver on it.

Does this renew your faith in the Pligg development team?

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Up until about 3 months ago this blog enjoyed a PageRank of 3, and a temporary PR5 which was probably due to the Google Dance, then during the last update it vanished.  This didn’t make sense to me as I didn’t think I had broken any guidelines, my backlinks were increasing as well thanks to the number of downloads of my free templates.

So I started to dig deep in this blog to try and determine what the cause was.  I immediately thought of the referral links I had on the blog, both in posts and in my sidebar.  Google frowns upon buying and selling links so I removed all sidebar widgets, paid links in the sidebar and all ads that weren’t Adsense.

Today I received an email from IZEA, it’s a pay per post type of web service, I had signed up for it some months back but never did get any paid posts and had completely forgot about it.  The email was regarding 6 major blogs that were paid to do a review for Kmart.  I read the post and perused the list of 6, I noticed ShoeMoney.com was on the list.  ShoeMoney is a blog I frequent for inspiration and ideas so I checked out his post.

After I read his post I looked up and noticed on my Google Toolbar that his main page had a PR6, I was dumb-founded, how could a blog who has numerous posts that he was paid to post have such a high PR.  Some would say must be because of the number of backlinks, but that wouldn’t matter if you are breaking Google guidelines about doing these types of posts.

At first I was furious, immediately thought that Google was making exceptions for certain high profile blogs and was trying to think of a way to ask Jeremy Schoemaker how he was getting away with it, but I thought, perhaps a little digging would be the best approach.

When it comes to questions about Google I always turn to Matt Cutts, if anyone would know the answer he would.  I did a search for paid posting and pagerank and found an article he had written about it here.  In this article the following line caught my attention;

In the same way that a regular surfer would want disclosure to know if a post were paid, all the major search engines also want to make sure that paid posts are adequately disclosed to search engines as well. Google’s documentation for webmasters gives examples of how to do that.

Now before I go any further, one possibilty of participating in paid postings without Google knowing would be to do what I suspect ShoeMoney does, mask the URL using a plugin that changes link referral URLS to look like another link on your blog then using robots.txt and tell Google not to index that directory.  So for example:

http://www.somesite.com/refid=555 to http://www.pliggs.com/sites/somesite

then in the robots.txt file I would put :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sites/

but again, I didn’t want to bother Jeremy by asking so I kept looking, I visited Google’s guidelines like suggested in the Matt Cutts post mentioned above for more answers.

Turns out I was wrong about paid posts to a certain degree.  Bloggers can still participate in these ventures and it will not effect their PageRank providing they do the following:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Looks like my idea with the robots.txt file was on the right track afterall.  Another thing you should do is disclose when a post is a paid post like ShoeMoney.com does:

Disclosure: I received compensation for writing this post.

After reading Matt Cutt’s post and the guidelines at Google, I then went back to the post at ShoeMoney about Kmart and sure enough the link to IZEA was a nofollow and the disclosure was at the top of the post.

Some of you probably already knew all of this, but I figured since I didn’t know there has to be someone else who doesn’t as well, or at least I hope I’m not the only one.

This discovery leads me to believe that it was probably the text links I had on this blog and the IZEA javascript code that caused the issue with my PageRank, hopefully the next update will see a return of my PageRank as all of those referral links have been removed.

So, am I the only one that didn’t know any of this?

Clarification: ShoeMoney isn’t the only one who posts paid posts, folks like John Chow do it as well.  I also want to ensure that no one thinks I was attacking ShoeMoney, I respect him and enjoy his blog, it was simply his blog post that got me to thinking about PR and compensated posts, plus any chance to link to his blog is a bonus.

Hopefully I won’t wake up tomorrow to a nasty comment or email from him.

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Gallery Images:

One impressive feature is it automatically fetches an image from the URL submitted.  It then resizes the image and it is placed in a gallery that forms the popular and upcoming pages.  The description of the gallery you are submitting is displayed on the comment page for the gallery.

Here’s a sample of what a submitted link looks like on the popular/upcoming pages, it’s the safest one to display here:

General:

With dozens of categories and thousands of submitted galleries, there is sure to be something for everyone.

This is one of the best adult Digg-like sites I have come across and definitely recommend you take a look.  Adult webmasters can use this site for a source of traffic.

If you submit any galleries, the tag and submission fields are optional fields, all that matters is the link to the gallery.

Edit Submissions:

Any gallery you submit can be edited by simply hovering over the thumbnail and clicking on the edit link, this is a very professional touch, on your profile page you will not find a list of galleries submitted, but rather a thumbshot of each gallery submitted, this makes it easier to find the one you are looking for.

Easy Submission:

You can easily submit a new gallery by entering the URL in the form at the top of every page:

Videos:

Looking to submit videos or find videos?  You can do that as well.

Video submissions are conveniently indicated with the traditional “play” button in the top left hand corner.

From the fantastic layout and functionality to the immense amount of content, this site gets a 10/10 from me.

WARNING: Hot Aphrodite is intended for audiences 18+ only.

Related posts:

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2. Getting Pligg to Auto-Fill Submit a story, if the story being submitted, has the...
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First the developers started posting modules that will not work with the Pligg CMS without butchering key features of it, for example this module, which has no business being released as compatible with Pligg.  I posted a viable solution to achieve this effect that will work with Pligg here.

Pligg seems to be more into pushing useless modules that you need to pay for instead of offering support.  This explains they declining member base and support which is clearly shown here.

Hopefully more and more new Pligg users read posts like this one and see what they are in for.  The CMS itself is good, but the development staff are unfortunately pushing people to use other CMS’s like Social Web CMS.

Here’s the latest instance of Pligg developers robbing new members.

My good friend Lincoln has also written about this over at Social CMS Buzz.

What do you think about current state of Pligg?

Related posts:

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