When you read the post title, your first thought might have been that it was a statement made for search engine optimization purposes. If it was, you'd be half right. While I couldn't care less what effect the external links (in the blogroll and top commentators for instance) have on my Google PageRank, I care about how my posts and pages are found.

While searching for some obscure information from one of my old posts, the Google Search results kept listing old copies of my blog index page as the source of the information. Well, I knew that wasn't right and it took me way too much time to find the exact post. This isn't a SERPS or SEO problem in my opinion, but a usability problem. It just isn't friendly in any stretch of my imagination.

Right now, the external links have the "rel=nofollow" tag added to them on every page except the index page to prevent duplicate content — now that's for SEO purposes. What I need to do is have the contents of posts when they're on the index page "not followed" or indexed by the search engines. The solution, in my unlearned opinion, is to move those external links to static pages and to use a robots.txt file to tell the search engines to ignore the index page. That way, the external links still count for who they're linked to when the index page is ignored.

Perhaps there's another or an even better solution. If anyone has a better way to defeat the problem I found, I'm all eyes and ears. If no one can help, I'll be implementing the changes I need to make real soon, based on my own thoughts about it. Now, while I'm on the subjects of usability and optimization, I'm finding that the widgets I placed at the bottom of the page under the footer really slow the final part of the page loading process down. It's not affecting anything really, except when the page moves while typing a comment which can be quite annoying. I think I just need to define the size of the CSS block on the page to stop that from happening. I'll have to run some tests.