10 Ways to Lower Your PageRank and Drive Out Visitors

Assalaamu'allaykum.

I've been blogging for one year. During that period of time, I learnt many lessons of various topics. The "One Year Blogging" series would consist of several of them. Actually, the postings --mostly-- would tell you what mistakes, ridiculous experiments, accidental lucks, anything I could remember I had done. In each posting I would write 10 things I knew from experience. The list was not ranked in particular order. You could choose to do the same mistakes or avoid them. It's all up to you. Wheter you did want to have popular blog or were eager to make your blog empty of visitors, as quiet as a graveyard in the midnight, I hoped the list would help you.

How I lowered the PageRank and Drive Out Visitors

1. Place as many News Feeds as possible
   Usually article or its excerpt in news feed not directly linked to the source. This made news feed brought many links that had nothing to do with blog content and those links carried less and less pagerank flow. In this case, many bloggers were reluctant to link to our blog in hoping of a link-bank because linking to our blog would lower their PageRank. This also happened if a blog had too many useless outbound links. (Case of Minum Kopi Pahit)


2. Make a disorganized link menu, place it at header section
   Because of css-style and its position, most headers are the first section that being crawled by search engine and the first link detected there was the most important information on the page. So, if we place a link menu at the header part of our blog, and the first link search engine found there referred to a page about "how to be sweaty in Antarctic", then the search engine would index our blog with that information. The relation with PageRank? The real contents of our blog would come as second or third priority in indexing. Other words: our real contents were regarded as less important than the Antartics lifestyle. (case of this blog and its Bahasa Indonesia version during the first months using ADxMenu)


3. Host blog images at any service with very limited user's bandwidth
   This ensured the images not displayed on the page every time the bandwidth reach its limit and would annoy the visitors who saw only simple notification image of "bandwidth exceeded" for every picture. This was more effective in decreasing visitors' interest to your blog if the images were important part of your contents. (case of all of my blogs with images hosted freely at imagecave.com. Easy way to avoid this, you can choose flickr, webpicasa, imagebam or other free image hosting provided user with better service. Next thing to do if this happened to ruin your blog skin and contents, move the images ASAP!)


4. Let different brokers display intext-link ads (plus no filtering)
   Google would lower pagerank of the sites/blogs with inline text ads and the more of them found, the lower pagerank they would brought. If you were really interest in lowering pagerank faster, let many different ads brokers placed their inine text ads... and you would also have benefit of reducing visitors by irritating them that way.


5. Install tons of third party widgets
   This ensured the blog took so long to load and most visitors just closed the browser in anger, never care what content was on the page. (Case of this blog and Kristik Islami)


6. Keep frequent use of poor grammar and misspelled words
   English or Spanish was not my first language and I had been never follow "the proper track" in learning them. The visitors would realise this when they found confusing sentences I wrote, and only if the really like the patterns they would stay. General visitors spent less than a minute on my blog with average page view of 1.6, and the average of returning visitors was less then 50% each month.


7. Use many images, never define their alt and title tags
   Search engines would have no idea what they were and how to index them. Certainly gave the blog no credit in page ranking. (Case of this blog and Kristik Islami)


8. Display blog content in iframe
   Very effective in lowering pagerank as other blogs/websites could never link to blog contents directly. (Case of this blog and Kristik Islami, first months I used classic template --HTML, not XML)


9. Never check the links
   This would bigger the chance of visitors end up with a 404 error page after clicking dead-links. More often they experienced this, less likely they would visit the blog again. Dead links also worked for dropping the pagerank. (Case of all of my blogs)


10. Have an video/audio clip automatically play as soon as the page loads
    Very great in prolonging the load time of the blog and very likely to make visitors jumped out from their seat. (Case of Share the Reading when I used online music player from immeem.com)

,


Thats all for now. I would post the second part of "One Year Blogging" tomorrow or the day after. Wassalamu'allaykum.

Special thanks for Matthew (Codesucker) for the inspiration