Huh?  What?

Don’t you love those little non-sequitur titles that just sneak up behind you and slap you upside the head with their message?  Sure you do!  But the point is clear–it’s time you stopped linking to Wired, or at least so often.

Plain and simple, when people read your blog, and they follow your links, and they start wondering if you just link to the same dozen sites over and over and over again, they start questioning if you’re worth reading.

See, links aren’t just about Google rank.  Links are also a measure of how well-read you are.  A measure of how much you get around online, so to speak, and if you’ve got lots of different places–even places no one’s ever heard of–you’ll get a bump in your credibility gauge if you can show people that you traffic in some unusual information.

There’s something to be said for being the guy who knows where the weirdest stuff on the internet is…as opposed to being the guy who can’t stop rewriting what Wired spits out.

So next time you want to find something to write about, don’t just stay on Google’s front page–go check out the back of the stacks.  You never know what you’ll find lurking around out there.

Now, I know this had a lot of you concerned.  After all, Google’s pretty much big dog these days.  if Google suddenly declared you had to kill a live chicken once a week in order to keep your page rank I’d bet a whole lot of us would be out looking for cleavers.

But for those of you who might have been concerned, linking outward really has nothing to do with your page rank.  It’s not a zero-sum game–your incoming links to other pages help their page rank, but they don’t specifically hurt yours.  Page rank is only measured by the number and quality of INCOMING links.

Though there is one caveat in the sense that, if you’re close in terms of page rank to another page, and you link to that page, you might bump that other page up sufficient to where you’ll drop.  But your number of outgoing links isn’t likely to directly affect you by much.

So link away, folks, you’re only helping others and giving you a chance to get links of your own.

Now this was something that got me.  I was reading over at Problogger about this, and the thought of it literally chilled me to the bone.

We all know that Google has a whole lot of reasons to kill your page rank, and most of them are things you’d deserve a penalty for.  If you’ve been selling text links, for example, or anything else that might be in violation of Google’s guidelines.  But what you may not know is that, at some point, for little or no reason, Google might kill your page rank and you wouldn’t even be responsible.

As it turns out, most search engines–and this includes Google–occasionally undergo changes to their algorithms, and when this happens, you might suffer an unaccountable, and unexplainable, loss in rank.

Now, this is for the most part generally temporary.  But if you should ever find your post ranking suddenly crashing, don’t panic.  It may well come back entirely on its own after just a couple days.  So take a deep breath, grab a drink, write your posts like normal and wait a couple days.  You might be surprised by what comes back.