A few weeks ago my tool bar page rank dropped to zero (from four). This happened without warning - OK on Friday, zero on Monday, and after some research I’ve just made some changes to this website and requested a review from Google. I’ll let you know how it goes.

First up, my main source of information was a post which listed the specific steps required to recover from this scenario. Some of these just didn’t apply, but it’s a good succinct read, nonetheless. Here’s what I did:

1. Removed the text link ads from my sidebar. I didn’t just comment them out, I removed the code completely. TLAs were generating the princely sum of $15 a month, so it’s a loss I can live with.
2. Added “rel=nofollow” to the four 125×125 ads in my sidebar.
3. Deactivated the NOFF plugin, which had the effect of adding “rel=nofollow” to all links within comments.

I don’t know for sure whether that’s enough. Time will tell. And I’ll post back with progress if I get any feedback from Google.

BTW, to request a review you need to log in to Google Webmaster Tools; the link is on the right hand side. You also have to have your submitted-for-review website validated in the Webmaster Tools interface.

A few months ago I moved this website from a static design (HTML and Dreamweaver) to a Wordpress-driven blog. Like so many sites shooting for position in the hyper-competitive SEO space, my static site was sitting with only a few views a day, and served only as a reference point for clients and prospects who wanted to “check me out”.

I just checked my Alexa stats, and my rank has now cracked the magic 1,000,000 mark (it’s at 838,216, down from 1,187,256 a week ago). Here’s the figures:

• Reach - up 2,100% in 3 months
• Traffic rank - up 3,453,147 in 3 months
• Page views - down 65% in 3 months

The page views per visit is a bit worrying, but I think it’s because a blog audience is very different from a static site audience.

My major traffic source is Stumbleupon, which is very exciting. My biggest traffic day was 4 Jan (560 visitors) following my Search Operators: The Definitive List post, however the most popular post, by just a small margin, is my Is Your robots.txt File Killing Your Search Engine Rankings? post.

I believe there’s plenty of proof here that a blog format can and does generate traffic to websites, and personally I’m really glad I finally made the switch.

Please leave your comments on your own experiences!

On Friday, this site had a Google toolbar pagerank (TBPR) of 4. Today, It’s zero.

Other than (almost) daily posts, there are four changes that may have caused this:

1. A myriad minor changes to the blog template. I fiddle with this a few times a week, so maybe something was done that caused a problem.
2. The addition of some paid links and 125×125 banner ads in the sidebar.
3. Removal of the “nofollow” tag, via a plugin,  of all outbound links including comments.
4. I joined this blog to the MyBlogLog and Bumpzee communities.

As you can see this site doesn’t have spam content, and it’s all pretty much focused on the topic of traffic generation. Nevertheless Google have decided something’s amiss and applied a fairly hefty penalty.

I plan to try two things, in order. First I will switch off the NOFF plugin & see what happens. Second, I will remove the paid advertising. All this over a period of weeks, so I can try to isolate cause and effect.

Search traffic accounts for only 5% of my total visitor traffic. So maybe, it just doesn’t matter anyway! There are many SEO experts who say that TBPR can safely be ignored (the only one that matters is their internal pagerank value), but all the same it’s nice to know there’s some love there. And it would be nice to know what caused the drop in the first place?

Here is a quick and dirty followup to my NoFollowFree (NOFF) post of a few days ago. I just found a list of social bookmarking sites that do NOT enforce the “nofollow” tag for submitted links.

http://www.maranan.us/list-of-do-follow-social-bookmarks/

So get submitting! Seriously this list is only an hour old. And greets to Alibata, who assembled the list.

This is the second of a two-part series on writing and using web page titles. The first post is about killer web page titles, and you can find it here.

Today, however, I want to introduce you to the three “titles” that matter on WordPress blogs, and how you use them to best advantage.

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Ask any SEO expert, and it’s likely they will tell you that the <title> element in a web page’s <head> section is the single most important factor to maximise search engine visibility. Create a title, they say, that includes the key term you’re optimising the page for… given time, links and luck, you should have a page that ranks well for that term.

It’s a little more complicated than that, as you know already. But I don’t disagree that the <title> element is very, very important, and this short post is the first of two on the topic of titles.

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Ever visited a blog and on the home, or index, page, seen how the posts there show a few lines then a ‘Read More’ link? In WordPress that’s the effect of using the ‘more’ tag, and there’s two reasons why you should use it too.

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By default, Wordpress inserts the ‘nofollow’ directive to all author and comment links to make comment spamming unattractive. While this seems like a good thing, the Akismet plugin (included by default with all new Wordpress installs) seems to do a pretty good job of stopping comment spam in the first place.

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I have just fixed the RSS feed for this blog, and routed it via feedburner. My apologies to you for not spotting the problem and fixing this earlier.

Way back in April 2007 I wrote a post about robots.txt, a small text file that instructs search engines about what can and can’t be indexed on your site.

Since moving to Wordpress a few months ago, it’s become clear that Wordpress has a few issues with duplicate content. In essence, it generates multiple URLs that address the same content. This is generally accepted to be a bad thing, and I’ve taken steps to fix it by adding entries to my robots.txt file. This post explains what I did, and why.

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