I think that I have been penalized by Google for a lack of attention on my part. There has been an ongoing debate about whether the blogrolls could cause problems with the search engines. I have been using a plugin called "nofollow links" since I started the blogroll. My reason for this was because I didn't want any page rank leaking.

Page rank is something Google does and there is somewhat of a controversy on how it effects your position in the SERPS. The common consensus is that it is mostly determined by back links. Now I am not going to go into all the technical jargon of how the back link structure works. Lets just say that if you have a back link from a site, some of that sites "link juice" flows over to yours.

Also, if you have outgoing links to other sites, you are giving them some of your link juice. That's where your page rank leaks. Now if you only have a handful of links this is nothing to worry about, but when you are talking about 100's, that is a different story. Page rank isn't what is really important. Your rank in the listings is what is important.

In a previous post, I talked about our potential to make some money as Alex Jeffreys affiliates when he launches his next coaching program. I want to be positioned to optimize my chances of making some sales. Therefore, I want to rank high in the search engines for the key word phrases "Alex Jeffreys coaching" and "Alex Jeffreys coaching program".

When I became a student of Alex's this blog was targeted towards a different set of keywords which I have changed to the above mentioned. In a week or so I had moved into the SERPS for my target keywords and was on page two and one respectively. Then a few days ago, I disappeared from the search engine results altogether.

I went 20 pages deep in Google and jtmartin.net was no where to be found. I also noticed that my page rank had gone from 2 to 0 overnight. I immediately began to investigate to find out what was going on. After much hair pulling and gnashing of teeth, I discovered what had to be the problem.

Another plugin that I had installed, was interfering with the "Nofollow Links" plugin. I discovered this by using an "extension" for the Firefox browser called SEO Quake. They also have an add on for Explorer too. This tool lets you enable a feature that will draw a line through any link on a website that has the nofollow attribute. That is how I found out my plugin was not working.

I fixed the problem with the blogroll and within a day my blog was back in the search engine results. My page rank has not returned. Thank goodness page rank is not that important. I guess I won't lose any sleep over that. I have more important things to concentrate on. Google update their page rankings quarterly. We'll see what happens in a few months.

Make sure you have signed up for the next issue of the Profit Pulling Project. I am going to go in depth about how to optimize your blog and also talk a little about blog etiquette and things we can do to help each other with out putting forth too much effort.