Recently there has been lot of discussions in blogosphere on Google’s decision to penalize the blogs that participate in paid links specially through Text Link Ads. Google started penalizing the websites that host TLA ads by reducing their PR to PR0 mostly. Basically Google penalization is considered as dropping out of Google search results but recently reducing the PR of any website can be also included in the Google penalization list I believe. Simply, because they rarely used to do it before.

The webmasters who were late to understand the importance of this decision, have been penalized and did not know how to deal with it once their PRs are down to PR0. For last few months, I have been hosting TLA ads and we also had been penalized by Google for some time meanwhile.

I removed the TLA ads that caused the penalization and decided to contact Google to request for re-inclusion. Here basically, my blog was not banned and was still indexed and getting Google search traffic. The only thing was the PR was reduced from PR4 to PR0 for some time. Even if many of you might think that PR does not matter, but I think it still matters when you measure the value of a blog or website.

What’s the good news?

My blog has been considered to in Google’s PR updates and back to PR3 now. We were PR4 couple of months back and now are PR3, but that’s all right. Because the way people are giving quality back links to this blog, I am sure that it will gain back the Page rank popularity and soon cross PR5. At least iWebtool’s PR prediction page shows, our blog will get PR6 in next update.

What I did to get out of Google penalization?

First I removed the TLA code from my blog. That was the major reason for PR changes I believe. I don’t blame them because they are doing their business and if Google does not like it, it’s up to people whom to follow and here I would prefer to follow Google than TLA.

I tried to gather the information on how to get rid of Google penalization but could not find substantial information except few useful articles. I tried to also talk to my fellow blogger Enkay about it, but unfortunately he did not have any idea about it as well. So, I decided to do what I knew and file a re-inclusion request with Google.

How to file Google re-inclusion / reconsideration request using webmaster tools?

Being clueless on what to do to get my PR back, I decided to contact Google directly for reconsideration of my blog at Google Webmaster Tools. I logged in with my Google account and found a link to “Request reconsideration” at the right side of the dashboard. I selected the website that was penalized from the drop down and then wrote down what I did to fix the problem [Here in my case, I explained how I thought TLA must be the problem for dropping the PR and how I removed TLA now and pasted the excerpt of conversation I had with TLA representatives when TLA contacted me on removing the TLA code from my blog]. Now submit this reconsideration / re-inclusion form and you are done.

I was done with furnishing all the details required by them including my guess on what could have caused the penalization. I did not have anything else to do than crossing my fingers and wait. Meanwhile, I made sure that I don’t lose the hopes and continue to maintain the quality of the website. Our Alexa rank numbers changed from 250K to 170K shows the traffic went on increasing in last couple of months.

And there we are! Today morning came out to be different when I saw almost all of my pages for their PR back and I am back in the Google PR race. I don’t want to get into debate of how important the PR is, that’s a different topic to write about later but yes, at this moment it’s important for me.

Now here is one interesting thing, dailyblogtips and problogger mention that today there was Google PR update and many of the blogs have gained or lost PR. I had read it before I come across their post. And before reading both the posts, I have noticed it on my blog itself at the first glance of my own blog in the morning in Firefox and was happy to see the green bar back again on my blog. Well, I have this nice Firefox plug-in installed that I use to check PR and Alexa for almost every site I visit.