Whenever I make an update to Kristen's Guide, I post update notifications to a blog hosted by Blogger. Blogger is easy to access (even when I'm on the road) using any computer (not just my own), so I like to use it for managing my blogs. However, I also want to have my posts on the home page of my website, making my website a blog/site hybrid, giving me the best of both worlds.

So I had been using a javascript to parse the RSS feed from my Updates blog and display the feed on the home page of Kristen's Guide. Then browser security changed, blocking parsing XML across domains, making it impossible for me to use javascript to parse an RSS feed from a separate domain, so I switched to a server-side ASP script to parse the feed XML.

The server-side parsing worked beautifully, but then Google dropped my page rank from a 5 to a 3. I can only assume that it's because it saw the copied posts from my blog and figured I was just copying content, which Google will dock you for.

So today, I used my server-side scripting to parse the XML from my Blogger-hosted Updates blog, posted the data into a separate text file on my site, and used AJAX to read the text file and display it on my home page. (Crawlers don't read AJAX/javascript, so it will ignore my copied posts.)

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will make my page rank jump back up to a 5.
Bigger rank = bigger advertiser income.

Labels: Blogging and Websites