My advice to beginner, if you want to do business online, develop a website honestly with long plan in mind. Give your visitor a content worth visiting more and again. Don’t try to cheat the search engine, and most importantly the visitors.
WSJ blog reports

The company constantly refines those formulas, and sometimes takes manual action to penalize companies that it believes use tricks to artificially rise in search rankings. In recent weeks, it has cracked down on retailers J.C. Penney Co. and Overstock.com Inc.

Google search engineer Amit Singhal said in an interview that the company added numerous “signals,” or factors it would incorporate into its algorithm. Among those signals are “how users interact with” a site.

… On Thursday night, Mr. Singhal and a colleague wrote in a blog post that most of the changes would be “so subtle that very few people notice them” but “it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results.”

Getting indexed or listed in Google Blogsearch means you get more traffic and exposure. Hence it’s important to have your blog post seen in Google Blog Search. Note, having indexed in Google.com will not automatically get your blog indexed in Google Blogsearch.

CONTENTS

1. Automatic Ping
   1. Self-Hosted WordPress Blog
   2. Blogger Blogspot
   3. WordPress.com
2. Manual Ping
3. Feedburner Setting
4. Platinum SEO Pack / All in One Seo Pack Plugins Setting
5. How to know it is Indexed?
6. Conclusion
7. If everything does not work

Below some simple tips to get crawled by Google Blogsearch.

I. Automatic Ping

I.A. Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

1. After login -> Settings -> Writing
2. Update Services  (at the bottom) put this inside the box -> http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
3. Save Changes. Done.

If you are using Feedburner, see Feedburner Setting

I.B.Blogger Blogspot

1. After login to Blogger.com -> Settings -> Basic
2. Opt “Yes” at Let search engines find your blog?
3. Save Settings. Done.

If you are using Feedburner, see Feedburner Setting

I.C. WordPress.com

1. After login to WordPress.com -> Settings -> Privacy
2. Site Visibility -> check the I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers.
3. Save changes. Done.

If you are using Feedburner, see Feedburner Setting

II. Manual Pinging

If you are blogging on free blogging services such as Blogger.com Blogspot or WordPress.com, you may ping Google Blogsearch manually.

1. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping
2. Enter your blog URL address
3. Click Submit Blog. Done.

III. For Feedburner User

If you are using Feedburner, make sure you deactivate the Noindex feature (Publicize -> No Index; by default it’s already deactivated / inactive).

After deactivating / disabling this feature, check your Feedburner’s source in browser (Firefox: view -> page source; Internet Explorer: View -> Source; Chrome: press CTRL+U), if this noindex code (<xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” name=”robots” content=”noindex” />
) still there, check your WordPress original feed, see this tutorial how to remove noindex tag from WordPress RSS Feed.

1. Correct Settings: Deactivate noindex.

2. Wrong Settings: Activating and selecting/checking or deselecting/unchecking both options will make your blog not-indexed by Google Blogsearch.

Further reading on this Feedbuer noindex thing,  read Andybeard’s post

IV. IF You are using Platinum SEO Pack or All in One SEO Pack Plugins
You have to make sure that the no-index RSS Feed option left unchecked.

1. After login -> Platinum SEO Pack / All in One SEO Pack admin setting
2. Uncheck the option: Use noindex for comments RSS feeds
3. Uncheck the option: Use noindex for all RSS feeds
4. Click Update Options. Done.

Note: After all this, if you have WordPress cache plugins (super-cache, w3 total cache, wp cache) installed, make sure you clear / delete / empty caches from WordPress cache plugins admin and delete cache from your browser as well and see the result from the browser source (Firefox: view -> page source; IE: view -> source; Chrome: press Ctrl+U). If the [name="robots" content="noindex"] is still there, just write a new post. The noindex will be gone.

In Pictures:

• Correct settings:
• Wrong Settings:

V. How to Know Your Blog Get Indexed or Not

1. Just go to http://blogsearch.google.com/
2. Enter this: site:example.com or try site:afatih.wordpress.com -> click Search Blogs

• If the response like this: Results 1 – 10 of about 11,317 for blogurl:afatih.wordpress.com -> this means the blog afatih.wordpress.com has been properly indexed  by Google Blog Search.
• If there’s no result found (like, Your search – site:example.com – did not match any documents.) , it means your blog is not yet indexed by Google Blogsearch.

VI. Conclusion

1. Google Blog Search will crawl, index and aggregate a blog based on the blog’s RSS feed.
2. Therefore, Google Blog Search will not index a particular blog if the RSS feed is set to noindex– either through Feedburner noindex feature or setting the original feed to noindex with or without plugins– as understood from point III and IV.
3. To see if your Feedburner is visible to Google Blog Search, open your Feedburner page. Example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/fatihsyuhud. View the source, if there’s “noindex” in it, your Feedburner’s feed will not appear in Google Blog Search. To fix it, see point III and point IV.
4. After fixing the noindex problem, write a post or two. Once the new post shown in your Feedburner, the noindex tag is gone.

Further reading

VII. If Everything Does not Work

If every attempts mentioned above does not work; your blog is still not indexed / listed by Google Blog Search after a week or two, you may want to contact Google Blog Search support for help since there’s a possibility that there’s a bug in Google Blog Search system that prevent your blog/site from being listed/indexed. Try to email them at blogsearch-support[at]google.com

You may download it (pdf) in any language you prefer. Here are the links:

• Tutorial SEO menurut Google (in Bahasa Indonesia)
• SEO Starter Guide (in English)
• Many other languages, click here!

Google PR sometimes not that important compared to Alexa ranking so far as traffic goes. Nor does this Googe PR drop has any significant influence to your previous traffics. If you see many unranked site or 0 PR have a good standing in SERP (search result pages). This site, for example, is ranked at #1 for keyword “blogger indonesia” , while my other site with PR 5 ranked at number 5 (see screenshot below)

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal whose site drops from PR 7 to 3 (imagine, how heartbreaking is that) says that in no way that drop decreases his traffics (his Alexa rank 3,500):

PageRank is seen by many as the end all value of a web site. Our PageRank dropped but we are receiving more Google search traffic than ever. PageRank does not define site rankings in Google or traffic and it should not be mistaken as so.

Roots and causes

So, what the basic reasons behind some website go down in Google PR?

Many SEO expert with many opinions all of which are agreed on certain points:

1. Paid linking. If you put a paid linking sites such as those from textlinkads.com, you are lucky if your blog / site doesn’t drop to zero. Paid linking is one mistake that will get penalized sooner or later.
2. Paid review. If you do a paid review every now and then from services such as Revew Me, etc you are just waiting for the Google PR penalties to come.
3. Duplicate contents. Either your blog content is a duplicated materials across your own sites networks or/ copy-pasted from other blogs / websites.

If you don’t do those three  breaches above but still experiencing drops in Google PR, chances are, as Daniel Scocco of Dailyblogtips. whose blog Google PR also drops to 4 said:

… a distribution of penalties (either automatic or manual). The theory that the penalized blogs were either selling links or part of a network that used a cross-linking strategy …

Google SERP for keyword “blogger indonesia” fatihsyuhud.com (PR3) is at #1 while afatih.wordpress.com (PR5) at #5