SEO Resources, Directions, Issues

The last five months have for this blog and a number of related sites, been a Google SEO disaster. I have many examples of it. For instance, this blog had a page rank of 4 as of August 2008. This rank and the associated SERP had been systematically earned over three years as I wrote, build relationships with other bloggers, and got cited. This fall/ winter, my PR dropped to Zero. Why? Did I lose links? Does it now take a lot more links to do well? More likely, I've done something wrong. I transgressed. Woops. But.....

What have I done wrong? Where have I done anything that's not strictly kosher? Below are my two best guesses of why this blog was dinged. I'll go fix them immediately and see if in the next round of updates, Google forgives or reinstates me.

1. I experimented with parking domains. And on this blog, on an array of posts, I documented that I had parked domains (at Godaddy, TrafficClub, and Namedrive) and I linked to them. It had a dodgy feel to it for me. I knew that I probably shouldn't have. But even Google has some sort of parking service so I thought it would be OK. I have two choices of how to clean this up:
A Go thru all my old posts and remove or "no follow" the links.
B. Unpark all my domains and just forward them to other domains.

2. I recently learned that you are not supposed to share any info about your adsense account. I had not known this (YES, I should have actually read the T&Cs of the Adsense service agreement when I signed up and reviewed them periodically). I learned this when I was chatting with a lady and asked her about her clickthru rate and she said, "I wouldn't mind sharing the info with you but Google strictly forbids it.". Seemed weird at the time but now that I'm looking at a PR move from 4 to 0, I wonder if what I've done wrong is that I actually blogged about my Adsense rates. It seemed harmless but Google has many many eyes and a big big big big stick. I'll find these mentions and delete them. I promise. I only hope it was on this blog and not some forum some place.

Is there someway to ask Google? Sadly not especially since this blog doesn't have the webmaster or analytics tools installed. If I did, I might find a hint in there. Instead, I start with a big info disadvantage.

Reading to Research this stuff
1 Matt Cutts. Esepcially his Google/SEO category. His PageRank post
2. Google's official stuff: Analytics, Webmaster blog, etc
3. Spinn .

Tools
Googles Free SEO Tools
SEO Harvester

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