Over the last few months my Google Page Rank has been slowly ripped away. It went from a PR of 2 in this blog to a big fat 0 within a short time. I have checked and rechecked my stats via Google analytics and Site Meter and my unique visitors and page views have gone UP, as well as backlinks, so how could my page rank go down?

Simple; advertising. Ahhh, not with Adsense though, Google doesn't get a profit from my blog. Through paid blogging as well as allowing people and/or companies to buy advertising on my site, I make a decent supplemental income for my family every.single.month.

Google does not like this and last year began taking page rank from bloggers' blogs who do just as I do. This causes advertisers to pull campaigns because they see low or no page rank. Search engine placement is a huge deal to advertisers.

This does NOT necessarily mean the traffic has slowed on a site, yet few people seem to care enough to check. They rely solely on that green bar that they've installed on their tool bar to dictate to them.

I'll admit it, I've become obsessed with upping my PR to get it back to where it was but I will NOT stop earning an income just to *please* Google.