On my sidebar, I have an icon of TopBlogs.com.ph with a number at the center showing my site rank on my category Web Development and Design. I have just recently put it back there since I have removed it for performance reasons.
January 2009 was the exact month when my site was on number one of Google search using my primary keyword. That was the time when I don’t know anything about SEO and stuff like that. I was just starting to experiment about it.
Since I’m monitoring the site performance, I mean the loading speed, I noticed that the TopBlogs icon loads slower than any of my images. It is as if it was the last thing loaded after all those cached images, css, js and even Google Ads are faster than it.
So I decided to remove it. For almost two months, my blog suffered for a very low page rank. Yes it is displayed on the first page, but it was not on top not like when it was last January.
Finally I decided to put it back for good. Today, my site was on number two on Google search. It is just yesterday that I’ve put it back! Therefore I conclude that it really works and it helps!