This domain (chucklinart.com) has been up for about three years which makes it pretty mature. (The domain is mature, not the content, which tends toward childishness occasionally, and that's -- channeling Stuart Smalley -- OK.) At one point it had an amazing page rank of 3. That fell off to 0. Fair enough. The blog has been mostly un-tended for about two years as I chased shiny rainbows elsewhere.

What I propose as an experiment which you can all watch in real time is to get chucklinart.com back to PR 3 using not one paid link. Neither will I solicit links by groveling to other blog owners to pretty please link to my little PR 0 bloggy woggy with the straight-from-the-box theme. Right now I have 18 backlinks from low-authority dinky little blogs like this one so this is an uphill battle.

(Cue Rocky theme song... clear throat, speaking in Rocky voice...)

But it's a fight I gotta fight for myself, for my own honor. It's not about showin' the world that I'm a champion, it's about showin' myself that I'm a champion.

(End Rocky voice.)

I've been hanging out over at SEOMoz, where the SEO kool kidz seem to congregate. Some jerk has been thumbing down all my comments. It ticks me off. It especially ticked me off on the blog post where the cool chick (who apparently has a job) talks about SEO project management and suggests everyone "put everything in a spreadsheet." In my comment, I compliment the article (It was pretty good... well, not bad, anyway.) and ask -- in an exceedingly polite way -- why she doesn't suggest some project management software instead of a spreadsheet. The thumb-downer stalker (who thumbed down all of my comments) thumbs it down, and nobody else thumbs it back up. Some other guy chimes in below me, "Hey, can anybody suggest some good project management software," (How original!) and gets like 50 thumbs up.

So I'm feeling kind of isolated, and I've been diligently studying the search engines since before Google was one Linux server in a Stanford dorm room. In fact, I was one of the earliest adopters of Google, maybe one of the first 10,000 and certainly one of the first 50,000 people to use it, when most of these kids were learning their ABCs. (OK, so the part about ABCs is hyperbole.) Anyway, they're not making me feel welcome over there, and it's filling me with the fighting spirit. Let's see any one of those venture capital-funded Silicon Valley softies achieve what I am about to achieve through old-school, unpaid, un-funded, broke-ass, flyin' solo SEO. Not that bringing a blog to PR 3 from PR 0 with little backlinking effort is a big deal, mind you.

(Rocky Balboa mode...)

It's just somethin' I gotta do. It's a big deal to me.

(Back to Chuck mode...)

The milestones are obvious: PR1, PR2, and PR3. I hope to achieve PR1 by the end of September, PR2 by the end of October, and PR3 by the end of the year. These are realistic goals given the circumstances. As this project proceeds, I will report my SEO efforts and the results. So far I have listed the site in a few worthless blog directories and linked to it from a worthless article directory. I have dropped comments on other blogs, but they are not showing as links if they have been published at all.

It might be informative, and it will certainly be interesting. You might want to get the feed. If you're one of those people who hates me for some inexplicable reason, go ahead and hit me with your best shot. Link to this site 300 times from your spammy Viagra site. If you have a blog and want to link to this saga, the story of a loner underdog fighting for nothing but honor, your help is appreciated.

The numbers as of right now:

Back links: 18
Page Rank: 0
Daily Visitors: More than you think -- but this is not important

Let the project begin.

(Cue Rocky theme song. Training montage fades to black.)