I think I may have unoptimized my blog, semiquark.blogspot.com. Without even trying, I've managed to hurt G's feelings in many ways.... it turns out I've been conducting an inadvertent clinic on driving away search engines. Learn from my tale of woe. How to make Google hate you without really trying *snipped 9 better reasons* Do something that looks actively hostile. Unicode characters in a title could indicate an IDN exploit. So a sweet little post called "We ♡ copyeditors" might resemble a wicked hack attack. Does the full post cover most of the accidental ways to get ignored by Google? http://semiquark.blogspot.com/2005/05/google-hates-me.html And the last reason, is it paranoid? Or would Unicode oddities, especially in titles, down-rank pages? I can see two reasons why a spider might spit out weird Unicode characters: the Unicode might be part of a poorly-coded IDN hack; or the spider might be poorly-coded -- like if I wrote it. ;] What do you think? Thanks, Scott P.S. Is "unoptimized" a word? or is it deoptimized? floptimized? stoptimized? -- SL
keep on blogging, post on other blogs (with related subjects) and use pingomatic .... only thing to do is keep on going and not overanalyzing this.