Webrank and Google PR penalty?

Not sure if you're penalized for using it or not...

[Midnight Shift]

A week or so ago, I read some other threads here about how Google may penalize you or ban you for using Webposition Gold, so I -now- know that using a rank checker is against Google's TOS. Before I learned this, I was using "WebRank" online. The PR on my site (it's the one in my profile) is at 2. I don't have many incoming links because I have no idea who to ask to link to me, so maybe I deserve the PR 2, but I wanted to know if my two weeks of using WebRank may have something to do with it as well.

[Chris_R]

no - they may ban your ip for using t, but won't hurt your listing.

[pageoneresults]

Hello Midnight Shift, welcome to Webmaster World. You said...

> I don't have many incoming links because I have no idea who to ask to link to me, so maybe I deserve the PR 2.

You have only one link showing in Google and that is from dmoz. The only way to increase your PR with Google is through a link campaign. If you do anything this week, spend an hour or two researching sites that you may be able to exchange quality links with. One or two links from a PR5-6 site will work wonders for you.

[nancyb]

be careful of using rank checking tools. Although Chris may be right, Googleguy recently mentioned that they (google) knew a site had used WPG. I would stay away from using it on google. It's been suggested that you could run a check on Yahoo to see your approximate rank for google.