I am trying to figure out how (or if) these two are linked. The forums posts that I have read already are not perfectly clear.
Let me provide an example. An officer in my guild just created an account. When he associated his character with his account, it had the correct rank for his character. But it did not transfer that rank to his account (website account ranks are a superset of WoW Guild ranks). Is it possible to automate this process so that a player's rank will always be equal to the character rank?
Similarly, if I remove someone from the guild, will their website rank be downgraded as well once I do an armory import?
When you edit a character, there should be a prompt that asks if you want a rank change to propagate to the account. This is how you'll keep that rank in sync.
Deleting a character, however, does not automatically drop the rank of an associated account.
