Not so randumb

Not too long ago, I added a feature to my site that linked to a random post on my site. Unlike the list of randomly selected post to the left (check them out) this link was truly random. If you clicked on the Suprise me! link, you would find yourself reading a completely random post. if you clicked on it again, you’d find a different post. This seemed like such a good way to get people to read older posts and get more involved with the site. Unfortunately, it worked too well. Google search engine spiders would crawl my site, follow the link and add it to their web of knowledge. Problem was, that the link changes every time. So when they searched for “grand canyon skywalk location” what they actually found was “AutoCAD Monkey” or whatever random post the link took them to. I don’t think they were too happy about their search results.

With that said, I have removed the random link from my sidebar. It remains in my RSS feed and I may add it to emails etc. but I will not make it available for Google any longer.