At the request of HMTKSteve of Ramblings from the Marginalized, and because I've been meaning to write this anyway, I'm going to tell you why Google restored my PageRank again.

Never mind that I no longer do sponsored posts. They're all gone and my PR was restored after I requested reconsideration from Google. It dropped again last month, while I was out of the country, and I requested reconsideration again upon returning. The cause for the drop the second time? I'm pretty sure it was splog (scraper/spammer blog) linking effects combined with someone reporting a banner in my left sidebar as a paid link (when it isn't). The latter situation gets my goat because Google dishes out the penalties first, without proof of any kind, and removes the penalties only when you contact them.

I digress. My PageRank dipped because I wasn't paying attention to the sploggers (I had other worries on my mind) for the last couple of months. This mini-tutorial will tell you how I managed to get my PR back up, and a point higher than I expected.

Google XML Sitemap

The Google Webmaster Tools is the starting place, but before you use them, you need to make sure your blog is set up to make it really easy. The first thing to do is include an XML sitemap at the root of your website. There's even a handy WordPress plugin that does the dirty work called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. Pardon the term, but you can Google for sitemaps for other kinds of websites.

Google Webmaster Tools

If you don't have an account with Google, go to Google webmaster tools and create one. After you've done that, or after you've logged into your Google account, you should find yourself at the "Dashboard". This is where you add your site, upload your sitemap for the first time, and verify site ownership.

The dashboard is also where you do another form of dirty work, as you'll see if you look at the links to the right of the page. You can download data (once the data is populated in their databases), report spam in their indexes (this is where you report sploggers), report paid links (be careful to report verified paid links only — they're pretty easy to spot) and request reconsideration.

Google Alerts

If a splog links to you, you may or may not receive a ping. If you do, so much the better. If not, use Google Alerts to find out when anyone mentions your site anywhere that's indexed by Google. If it isn't indexed by Google (you can find out by searching and I'll explain that in a moment), Google can't and won't do anything about it. Here are the search terms I use for my blog:

link:http://untwistedvortex.com
link:http://www.untwistedvortex.com
Untwisted Vortex
UntwistedVortex
untwistedvortex.com
www.untwistedvortex.com

It may seem like overkill, but this catches them all.

Digital Footprints

When you get a ping or an alert, Google wants to know what search term caused the splog content to appear in their index. I use the FeedEntryHeader WordPress plugin to prepend (yes, it's a word) my copyright information to the beginning of my full feeds. When I search, I search for "2008 RT Cunningham" (with the quotes) and every site using my full feed, scraped to partial or otherwise, pops up. Most are legitimate sites, like social sites, while others are blatantly obvious sploggers.

I just did searches for 2007 and 2008 and found 24 links, all legitimate. There were many more when I first returned to the Philippines and I reported the bad ones.

Request Reconsideration

Don't even bother with requesting reconsideration if you have paid links on your site without rel="nofollow" added to the links. Your request will be denied. Otherwise, go ahead and do it once you've reported all the spam you find. Even if you don't find any spam, and your PR dropped, request reconsideration anyway. People make mistakes.

I shouldn't tell you this, but I will. Even if you have paid links without the "link condom", you should request reconsideration, especially if the paid links are only on certain pages and not sitewide. I don't need to say this, but stay away from payperpost.com and text-link-ads.com — Google has already made it known that they'll penalize you for their links and sponsored posts. Of course, if you don't mind a PR of 0, it really doesn't matter, in which case you shouldn't be reading this.

Contact The Sploggers

Or contact their web hosts, whichever works best (most splogs don't have contact information). Attempt to get the offending page(s) removed so they don't accidentally get indexed by Google again. Remember to preserve the evidence (screenshots work) before contact.