As I mentioned on my previous post About The Next Google PageRank Update, with a few days delay Google completed the last PageRank update for 2008. The next one will probably be in March 2009. It is like a never ending game.

My blog’s PR was 0 for the last few updates. So early in December, I took some serious action. Even though I do believe that PageRank has nothing to do with good quality and reliable content, most of the first time readers and sponsors still take PR into consideration at first look.

So what did I try to get my PR back?

You might think that I requested reconsideration using Google Webmaster Tools. I knew that it was useless unless your blog or website was completely banned by Google.

Instead, I got partnered with a SEO expert, and the Seo Tools Shop was born. It is just another story, which I will mention later in a separate post. Lets focus on the things I did to get my PR back:

• I completely changed the permalink structure of my blog. See The 5 Basic Steps Of SEO For Your Blog – Part 1 for more details. In other words my blog became a brand new blog, or considered as brand new by Google. If you follow the same step, don’t forget to update your Sitemap too. This will ping major search engines about the permalink structure change.
• At that time I had around 300 posts. I spent one whole week to add convenient tags into each and every blog post.
• I started using Platinum SEO plugin. Take a look at this post for more details: The 5 Basic Steps Of SEO For Your Blog – Part 3
• My SEO expert partner did a very deep link analysis for my blog. We found out that the problem was not a big one. Majority of the links pointing to my blog were coming from PR0 blogs. On the other hand, my Alexa was around 64,000. Probably Google bot thought that I was using scripts to manipulate their system to increase Alexa ranking of my blog, with too little backlinks from the blogs with high pagerank.
• I removed my blog from sites like ReviewMe, TextLinkAds, Linkworth, etc. They are all PR killers!

So guess what happened during the last update? Nothing happened in terms of PR!

It was the last lesson I learned. When you do a permalink structure change in your blog, it takes more than one month to see the reflection on PR. But now I do know that if I keep on writing at this pace (ideally one post everyday!), and focus on SEO of my blog (both on-site and off-site), I will have a good PR on 2009 March update.

But the indexing rate of my blog tripled in 3 weeks. Type “site:www.searchforblogging.com” in Google, and see my blog’s indexing rate. As your blog’s indexing rate increases, your organic search engine traffic also increases.

I wanted to share this if you are in similar position. Don’t spend your time begging Google for reconsideration. No matter what others say, follow above mentioned steps. You will not see the positive reflection on PR immediately, but your search engine traffic will increase significantly.