I am not one of those people who worships at the altar of Google. Their green bar of power has not had any impact on my life before now. Unfortunately I am forced to kneel before the mighty G and ask for forgiveness.

You see, on one of my blogs I sold text link advertising. My DSLR Photography Blog had a PR of 6 so I thought I would make some cash off the fact. Google doesn’t like that. Messes with their heads. You can guess what happened next …

So Google did what Google does. What Google giveth they can take away. Bye bye green pixels. Of course the idea is if they devalue your commodity then you will likely stop selling it. Good plan.

Strange thing though, my text link customers did not go away. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Mr Cutts!

If their downgrade of green didn’t impact my bottom line, why am I doing the mea culpa shuffle? It turns out I have had another offer to buy the site, but at a much lower price than when it was PR6. This customer is not bothered at all about PageRank, but they are concerned that this drop is a sign of a hand penalty.

It’s the whiff that I might have been flagged that has reduced the asking price. My traffic and subscribers are up but no buyer will take the risk that Google is going to handjob you out of the search results at any moment.

This leaves me cap in hand, calling for forgiveness, asking for mercy, for something that wasn’t a sin in the first place.

Author: Chris Garrett Chris is a professional blogger and internet marketing consultant. You can get more of his blogging tips, internet marketing advice and copywriting articles and a FREE ebook just by subscribing at chrisg.com