What NOT to do if you want to be found online
One of the reasons I started this blog was to test different things that I wouldn't otherwise do on a website that is very important to me. Case in point, take a look at the post below. Before I made that post, I had a Google Importance Rank of "3". After the post, I have a "0". The reason why this happened is because it looks to Google like I'm just adding links. There are a tremendous number of sites out there that will sell blocks of links from sites that have Google importance ranks of 2-3.
I may have been able to mitigate the damages if I had used the rel="nofollow" in the link html. In other words, I should have entered links like this (I've since updated it so we'll see how long it takes until I have a Google importance rank):
<a href="linkehere.com> rel="nofollow">link anchor text</a>
The above link looks like this on the page:
Had I included the "no follow" tag, it would have told Google that theses are primarily for my users and not meant to be sold to would-be advertisers.
One might argue that it may have been simply an algorithm change at Google and not something that I did. The counter argument is with the other sites that I manage-- they did NOT go down in their Google importance rank.
Fortunately, some of my most popular posts still receive a significant amount of traffic so I'm not sure what the real value of a Google rank is these days.
Moral of the story- keep a "learning" site like this so you don't kill a major site.
3/24/11 UPDATE
It looks like after I put in the No Follow tags, my site regained an importance rank of 3.
