We DoFollow

Following this last PR smackdown, I had to spend a lot of time trying to figure out why we lost it. Of course, Google was pointless - they refuse to explain, or even attempt to justify, their actions based on the misguided concept that their corporate policies are "proprietary."

What I'm saying here is that Google's algorithm is certainly proprietary - no problem; telling people what they can do with their content, what conent they are "allowed" to publish, and so forth is not proprietary in nature... it's fascist in nature. But that is neither here nor there, really.

The problem is that, according to everything I was able to find, we had suddenly lost all our backlinks. That is, though it claimed we have nearly 4000 backlinks, all of them were coming from PR0 sites and blogs. I found that extremely odd and manually checked several of them. Of course, not every site leading back to us had a PR0 - several have PRs as high as 8! But these diagnostic tools insist The Rundown has fewer than 100 backlinks (again, while listing over 3800 at the top of the page)...

So I tried to place an ad on Google AdWords a few weeks back because HP sent me $50 worth of free advertising. Unfortunately, my account was not credited through and I never received an e-mail or notification telling me this; I logged back in and discovered it on my own. I sent them a message regarding this last week and have yet to hear back from them. I sent another this morning.

This continued belligerence and Google's despicable "proprietary corporate policy" led me to a different tool, which showed that Google "couldn't find" basically any of the labels - the labels, like the tags added to every post. Now, Google is probably the shadiest company ever online, but I find it hard to believe they would simply exclude all tags in their results without specifically being told to do so. So I had to come in and see why they were being excluded according to my non-existent "robots.txt" and that's when I discovered the hidden code which automatically adds the "nofollow" attribute to backlinks.

And removed it.

I am now working on finding this non-existent "robots.txt" file and removing it. I checked and we are not banned from Google (at least not yet), so I don't know what this means. I also haven't changed the template anytime recently - well, I think I changed the keywords a few weeks back, which may have coincided with this change. In fact, having META-data in the template at all may be the very thing which is excluding the tags. Who knows?

The best I could find said Google may have chosen to ignore them because they return search results. Again: who knows?

Google thinks how the Web works is proprietary to their company. I do not believe it is, though I must admit I am constantly spending an inordinate amount of time trying to figure it out...

Anyway, feel free to link to any and everything you like here and know that once you do, a reciprocal link will be automatically generated.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008