Help ensure the long term health of this community

Here's the short version: if you (or friends even ;-) have blogs or websites, putting a link to http://www.debtconsolidationcare.com will continue to ensure new people find the site. If people thought it'd be nicer, we could maybe have on of those "banner link" graphics (I bet Moondanzer could make us something :-)... but honestly just as simple as a link with the words debt consolidation care or get out of debt or whatever makes all the difference.

Sounds trivial, but there's actually a serious problem happening, and its actually more important than you might imagine... read on!

1) New people are critical to the long term health of this community (as well as being people we can help, of course!)
2) Google & Yahoo are the thin threads from which virtually all new people come to this site. If you can't find this site in a search, you probably won't find it at all.
3) Those threads are already unravelling a bit, with debtcc dropping in the search results, and hence fewer people seeing this community.
4) The way to get higher in a Google/Yahoo result is to have more websites link to us

If search engine visits unravel, this site will stop getting new people coming through. Over time, it'll become like a ghost town, and a really important resource will be lost.

The surprise is, that despite the community being really healthy now, the threads from Google/Yahoo have started to fray a little. Let me explain how this can happen (I'll talk just about Google in this, but Yahoo works similarly).

There are 28 million websites that include the phrase "get out of debt". If somebody types "get out of debt" into Google, Google has to decide which websites to put first. As you can imagine, most people click what Google puts first, less click 2nd, and if you aren't on the first page of search results, almost nobody clicks.

Question: How does Google decide which websites are important?
Answer: They measure how many other websites link to that website! They call this the websites "PageRank" and it is a number between 1 (not important) and 10 (important)

For the size, value, and high activity level of this community, I would expect it to have a PageRank of about 8 out of 10 (in fact, a previous community I was in for several years has a page rank of 9 and was much much smaller and less important to society). Currently DebtCC has a PageRank of 5. This doesn't sound too bad, except that because of the way Google measures PageRank... 8 means something like 10x the number of links as 5.

Why is the PageRank so low?

The most obvious reason is that people are a little embarrassed about debt. If they find help on these forums, they're not likely to go link in their blog or website that day and say "the people on debtcc really really helped me get out of this terrible debt". Its just not something you talk about publicly. Which is too bad, because the commercial websites pushing debt consolidation are BUYING links (and ads) so that they look more important to Google. As their pageranks go up, and debtcc stays the same, slowly... over time... it will happen like it has happened many times before and the organic community resource will be replaced by big corporate websites with slick sales.

I think all of us would rather be doing something besides "promoting" the website. It sucks. I would rather be working on new designs that help people find what they want, you'd rather be answering questions. But because of this quirk about how people react to debt, we really DO need more links to this website or it will be at risk of losing fresh blood and so losing a lot of its purpose.