Daley Ponderings

About a year ago I realized that the search results from search engines were returning different index pages from this blog, instead of the actual article that contained the term that the person was searching for.  This is because the index pages only show the last 10 articles and are updated regularly, so the version the search engine has is often out-of-date.

I decided that I would do the"right" thing, and exclude my index pages from being indexed and tell the search engines to just follow the links, using the "noindex" and "follow" meta robots tags.  However, the side effect of this is that Google (I haven't checked the other engines, I assume there is a similar result) lowered my "page rank", so that my site was less likely to come up in a search.

Linking to yourself isn't supposed to affect anything but apparently it does, which is silly, since people can just make tons of fake pages that all link to themselves to get them higher in the rankings.

A month ago, I removed that code, and now my site comes up first for various appropriate terms.  So, spammers, now you know a new trick, if you didn't know it already.