Along with many sites that were impacted by the latest Google trick, ISEdb page rank has dropped to 4. We held PR 7 for over a year and a half and then it was dropped to 6 in the last Google update many months ago.

Last night, I realized the green bar had shrunk and went down to 4. I must say that I panicked for a while and thought Google was targeting ISEdb. I went out to search other sites and noticed some of the main and most popular sites have dropped as well.

I was actually waiting for this to happen since the news about Google going after web sites that sell text ads. Danny Sullivan wrote few weeks ago about this in his post "Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google"

Now, the question is, do we sell page rank? I don't know, ask Google that question since they own the green bar.

We do sell text link and that is how ISEdb is fu
nded and editors are paid. Our text links are displayed and marked clearly on the site.

We have also hired a third party ad agency to manage some of the ads.  Outsourcing is part of the business these days, right?

We don't use "no follow" attributes in any link that is displayed on ISEdb.COM whether it was paid for or not as some have suggested to avoid this. We never bothered to take that extra step to see which link we should add those attributes to.

Our goal has always been to concentrate on our business and the content of the site and the rest will follow.

The main thing is we didn't see any drop in traffic and the number of subscribers continue to increase.

If you bought ads on our site for the sole purpose of page rank then you didn't do your homework. The market rate for a site with PR 6 or 7 is more than $100 per page. Our rates start at $100/month and your ad is displayed on all pages which by the way is a violation to passing PR.

Our goal was  to give our advertisers the most exposure and we will continue to do that whether we have a page rank of 1 or 10.