We're probably doing all we can to lower our blog's Google page rank

These days a lot of us blogging fiends are keeping an eye on our page ranking. A lot of factors come into play when determining page rank. And lots of blogs are being penalized for various reasons. To this laywoman's view, among them are:

1. Blog Spam - I've been told that the incestuous nature of blogs (linking to one another and whatnot) can drive down page rank. Kind of funny about this—you are bumped up in the ratings by having people comment on your blog, and link back to it, but yet you get zinged for having "blog spam". I don't get it. (Warming up to a rant here.) You can check on your blog spam using the bad neighborhood tool mentioned below.

2. Monetized Blogs - If you get paid to post, and advertise this on your blog, you can (and most likely eventually will) get slammed down to a zero faster than you can come up with a Sarah Palin joke. I personally don't think this is fair, as most websites have one form of advertising or another contained within. I just see blogs penalized for this. Are bloggers held to a higher standard? And if so, pray tell why? Bloggers are just human beings with human frailties like hunger and the desire to keep our children clothed. Last time I checked, nobody (with the exception of Robert Scoble), was getting rich off of blogging. I for one am just hoping to pay the electricity bill this month. And it's a catch-22. You have to have a certain page rank to receive offers, but if you do your page rank will revert to zero. Makey no sense. But I digress...

According to IZEA Customer Love:

Unfortunately, no one knows why Google Page Rank has updated for so many bloggers. One theory is that they are discounting paid links, however, many sites that do not participate in paid programs have also experienced a drop in rankings.

Some people think it has more to do with the no-follow tags and still others think it is the incestuous nature of blogs (everyone is linked to everyone else).

In addition, with the recent launch of RealRank in the Izea Marketplace, page rank will not be of as much importance since our system is now able to provide actual traffic metrics instead of estimates and elusive algorithmic theories.

[ETA this blog is no longer monetized. Ref: I will be a ho no mo!]

3. Bad Neighborhoods - Being considered a bad neighborhood is likely to affect your page rank. Think of it like VD. Even if you aren't a bad neighborhood yourself, if you have even one link to a site considered a bad neighborhood within your blog, you will be considered a bad neighborhood yourself and penalized for it as will all may all of the other people linked to you. I found a great tool to help with this. (Side note, I had to remove some links to my favorite blogs because they came up as bad neighborhoods for silly reasons. Fo shizzle!) Be sure to use this site to check your blog often, and use it to check links before you include them in a post.

4. Link Density - Apparently Google doesn't like to see more than one hundred links on a page. Now this sounds reasonable to me, and easy enough to achieve. Problem is I can't do it. You see, I like to promote other blogs and give credit where credit is due. That means I have links to other blogs speckled among my posts and pages. Add these links to the blogs on my blogroll, and the links to freebies and articles and whatnot and suddenly I'm venturing into the overlinking zone! You can also check on your link density using the aforementioned bad neighborhood tool.

5. Nofollow tags - You can read about them here. The idea, from what I've been able to grasp thusfar, is to have links on your blog, but sort of make them invisible to search engine spiders by adding the'rel="nofollow"'attribute so that you won't be penalized due to the previous four reasons and probably others. I know that most sponsored post advertisers don't allow them, but they are still being used quite a bit.

I'm sure there are other things that can negatively affect your Google page ranking. I'll update this post as I come across them, so please be sure to bookmark it and check back often! If you can think of anything to add, please comment below.