23 | August | 2006

Last week I noticed my precious little blog posts, which have been nicely indexed by Google, were dropping out of the index like flies. Of course I should have checked the source code but it took Aaron’s note today to make me realize the blog was placing a noindex/nofollow everywhere, making it impossible to get indexed.

Appears this also happened to the illustrious Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, and there I learned to flip the “privacy” feature back to allow searches in.

To fix the WordPress NOINDEX NOFOLLOW problem click DASHBOARD > OPTIONS > PRIVACY and select to allow search engines.

I’m still a bit concerned that somebody may have done this maliciously, but never attribute to malice that which can be reasonably attributed to stupidity (or some bug in the system).

Anyway, who would stoop so low? Duck hunters?

New York Times notes that only ONE of the Fortune 500 CEOs is a blogger. That would be Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, who’s also a very cool guy for supporting MashupCamps in Silicon Valley and sporting very long hair.

Should the other 499 CEOs be blogging? Even if we leave aside the challenges they’d face from SEC and shareholder scrutiny of every post, leaving them and the company open to liabilities, I’m not at all convinced that blogging is suitable to old style business models.

However, it’s VERY suitable to new style business models and I think the early Corporate CEO adopters like Parsons at GoDaddy and blog Maverick Mark Cuban are going to see a lot of long term value from the practice, especially if they are ever challenged by the very forces that keep other company leaders from blogging. If, for example, ICANN or the SEC challenged Bob Parsons or Mark Cuban on some aspect of their business I’d be a lot more sympathetic to their side of things because I’ve read these guys and know they are straight shooters who often wear their business decisions on their sleeve. Without blogs they’d just be big shadowy Corporate insiders, with them comes a sort of friendly transparency that Robert Scoble and Shel Israel note in their excellent book about this topic, Naked Conversations.