Technical Difficulties (Part II): Hell and Your Bad Neighbors

I guess Site Meter and IE worked things out, so I added SM back to my neurotic stat-checking world.

Poking around in my blog template, and thinking about stats, somehow led me to some tutorials about adding site maps to Yahoo and Google, in order to help the bots find your site, thus increasing your ranking in the search engines. I used some of this guy's suggestions, which led me to these specific instructions for blogger users.

Next, I did a test to see if I'm in "supplemental index hell," which I am (no surprise there). Only 25% of my blog's pages are indexed, the rest just hang out with the red devil himself, I guess. Some of the offenses that can get you in this limbo-land are: redundant content, obvious spam-type content, other spammy stuff, and what they call, "bad neighbors."

I went ahead and checked to see what my cyber neighborhood looked like, 'cause you got to be from the right side of the tracks to get in good standing. Well, guess who turned up as a bad neighbor? My old friend, Gwendomama, from my link below. Not because she's actually a bad neighbor — I'd know, she lives in my town — but, because she had a link to her friend's blog: a certain friend who likes to walk around and take naked pictures of herself (all tastefully done, I assure you). So, in order to redeem myself, I only had to take away the link to G's specific Site Meter post. Apparently, I get to keep the link in my "friends and family" side bar list. Whew! Sure wouldn't want friendship to get in the way of my ascension into search engine heaven.

So, I guess the moral of the story is: If you, as a middle-aged-woman, walk around naked and post about it on your blog, you end up in search engine hell, and/or bringing others down with you. I'm all confused. I thought search engines liked that kind of stuff. At least that's what my keyword search stats tell me.