May 20, 2005
Blogging | Movable Type | Search Engine Optimisation
Google Pain
Damn trackbacks. I went back to my previous post Optimising Movable Type for Google and put in trackbacks for all the blog entries that I referenced (those that would accept trackbacks anyway). Most blogs use rel="nofollow" on their comment and trackback links now (standard in Movable Type 3.16), so I wasn't expecting this to help the Google rank of my post at all. 'Twas more of a courtesy thing to let those folks know I had referenced them...
Well it turns out the trackbacks hurt my post's Google rank somewhat. Here are the before and after snapshots. You can see the title of my post has pushed one of Ander's posts up one slot (not a big deal since that post was already ahead of mine). Cre8asite has come out of no where, but that's the nature of the web. The other change is the Six Apart post on Cal's Dashify plugin. It has nothing to do with Google optimisation at all -- it simply has a trackback from my post. Google doesn't know that though, it just knows Six Apart's post is more important than mine and (now) has the right keywords. Argh! I suppose it's some consolation that anyone that goes there looking for information on Google optimisation will eventually click through to me.
Posted by Adam Boddington at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)
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