On Friday, this site had a Google toolbar pagerank (TBPR) of 4. Today, It’s zero.

Other than (almost) daily posts, there are four changes that may have caused this:

1. A myriad minor changes to the blog template. I fiddle with this a few times a week, so maybe something was done that caused a problem.
2. The addition of some paid links and 125×125 banner ads in the sidebar.
3. Removal of the “nofollow” tag, via a plugin,  of all outbound links including comments.
4. I joined this blog to the MyBlogLog and Bumpzee communities.

As you can see this site doesn’t have spam content, and it’s all pretty much focused on the topic of traffic generation. Nevertheless Google have decided something’s amiss and applied a fairly hefty penalty.

I plan to try two things, in order. First I will switch off the NOFF plugin & see what happens. Second, I will remove the paid advertising. All this over a period of weeks, so I can try to isolate cause and effect.

Search traffic accounts for only 5% of my total visitor traffic. So maybe, it just doesn’t matter anyway! There are many SEO experts who say that TBPR can safely be ignored (the only one that matters is their internal pagerank value), but all the same it’s nice to know there’s some love there. And it would be nice to know what caused the drop in the first place?