What Not To Do When You Lose Your Google Rank

We're a web whore. And so we take the time to google for ourselves just to be sure our own website is the top result for our name or other things associated with us. Mostly this is vanity. After all, we want to make sure people searching for "ian macallen" get sent here and not to some Scot's sword making website. Or for instance, when hack writer James Rogauskas released a book titled Office Haiku, we wanted to make sure anyone searching for the key term Office Haiku got sent to our site. [And for the record, we've been writing better Office Haiku than Rogauskas long before he released his book, but we're not bitter. Not TOO bitter, anyway].

But if for some reason James Rogauskas built a half-way decent website promoting his office haiku book, and somehow was able to knock us off the top spot, we wouldn't email him a complaint. But that's what happened to blogger Dean Hunt, who without even trying, displaced a commercial website, who apparently received a strange requset to delist his own website from Google. And of course, you wouldn't be reading about it here had Mr. Hunt not put the email online.

So not only is Dean Hunt already more popular than the other site, but now thousands of bloggers are probably making him even more popular by linking to the article he wrote about the website that is less popular then his. The lesson here is, if some guy out does you in the Google ranking, don't get pissed off and send him an email asking him to make his site suck more than yours so you get higher in the Google ranking.