You have a point in that I don't actively work to get top 10 listings or high ranking, so many of my articles aren't something you would see everywhere like you would with many of todays blogs that are heavily tied into social networking and that sort of thing. Instead, I focus on improving the way my site runs, by working to improve the communication between network hosts and my server. But that's more of a hobby.

The other thing I focus on is content, content, content. My articles are definately in a niche, and a somewhat small one at that, and I realize my writing leaves a lot to be desired, but what I do work on is to only provide unique and helpful information here, as well as the online tools offered. So ya, you may notice I don't have any retweet, diggit, stumble, etc., buttons that really do help boost your traffic ranking by giving you exposure and external links. I'm just not focused on building traffic and rankings that way.

Above all, I want to avoid Fluff posts that are essentially a repost of someone elses repost, with a slight spin on it (that may be auto-blogging translators). They definately work for most sites, at least in the short-term, but more and more I have seen the rise of auto-bloggers using this to repost over and over and over again content copied from another site. Utilizing hundreds of sites to launch a concerted SEO campaign to rank up for different things, and it works in the short term, but believe me when I say that Google in the future will have algorithms in place that eliminate this type of fluff nonsense that makes the web full of bad information and much more difficult to find good information.

I like to reflect on the difficulties involved in developing working algorithms to combat this stuff, much of it will occur at a low-level of the net. If you think about trying to develop an algorithm to remove these autoblogging "SEO experts" you may come to the conclusion I have arrived at: True SEO is when your content is in reality more inline with what a user searching Google is looking for, rather than cornering the link-juice market with autoblogs. True SEO should be executed with the idea that eventually, Google or someone else, will perfect an algorithm that rewards content and substance over form. So my advice is to plan for the long-term and focus on providing real value to your site visitors, whoever they may be ;)

Just saying that while I don't doubt anything you say, experience tells me that you aren't coming up in the top 10 the way you think you are or the way you want to.

Does that WP tag is_paged() block all paginated pages with nofollow? If you nofollow paginated tag/category pages it might block search engines from finding all your old content unless you create another way for search engines to find that old content.

I think "follow,index" and "follow" are redundant. Search engines will automatically follow and index if there is no meta robots tag.