What a great surprise this week from the great Google in the sky. I worked really hard on this site from July 2006, packing it with content rich posts using targeted keywords. Of course I got the new domain indexed on Google within two weeks, that is usually easy to achieve. But the Page Rank box on my Google toolbar remained stubbornly white, indicating Page Rank 0 in spite of hundreds of backlinks to the site. I was baffled and frustrated, and this had a financial effect because a blog with Page Rank 0 misses out on the highest paying ‘Paid to Blog’ opportunities. Every time a Page Rank update came through I lived in hope of a higher ranking, but no chance. I even started to wonder whether my domain was in some way banned, but it passed all the SEO checks available. In the end I started to concentrate my efforts on another paid to blog site that I set up nearly two years ago. That domain already has Page Rank 3 so the hard work had been done. In October this year I have had some contract work, so I have not been at my laptop quite so often. This weekend I decided to view all my sites, to make sure all was OK with them and I discovered that latest Page Rank Update had taken place, giving this site Page Rank 4! Some of my other sites have also benefited from the Update, including my Budget Travel Tips site, which moved from 2 to 3 and my Adsense Earnings Advice Blog, which moved up from PR3 to PR4. Now I have heard that many big name sites like Andy Beard Niche Marketing and Blog Herald have fallen from PR6 to PR4, apparently because Google decided to penalise these sites for selling paid links on their web pages.  Now these are definitely NOT link farms.  They are established sites filled with authoritative quality content. As much as I love my blog and cherish it after all the hard work I have put in to it, there is no reason why their Page Rank should be the same as mine – don’t take it away, though!