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Ranking in the Search Engines: Why It Takes So Long

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There are many factors that determine your site’s authority, trust and general ranking. One of them is Google’s PageRank, though not everyone subscribes to this theory. I believe Google PR has a great deal of value as a metric for gauging the success of your blog. That’s especially true since many ad networks and “pay per review” services determine your earnings per unit using PR, amongst other metrics.

Google PR itself is determined by several factors. This is a very light treatment of Google PageRank (PR) and should not be construed as gospel. I don’t profess to know the entire algorithm as its nuances are a mystery to most outside of the search engine team, no doubt. But a general look at how PR is built up should help you understand why some new blogs take longer to rank than others. If history is any indicator, you have less than 90 days before the next PR rollout, so your link building efforts should start now, especially if you have a new blog.

Understanding PR buildup will also help you understand some of the reasons why your new blog is taking so long to get web traffic. I’m trying not to clutter the discussion with too much technical description. What’s important is that PR can be used as a loose, relative measure of success. It’s not enough in and of itself, but it’s something concrete. Here’s a loose summary of my thoughts on PR.

  1. PR is valuable.
    I am of the opinion (despite claims from other SEOs) that increasing your Google PR helps increase your traffic because you CAN rank higher for certain keywords/ phrases in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This is important since Google dominates search traffic in most parts of the world. Thus, increasing your PR draws more traffic, some of which may be bloggers. So if your content is linkworthy, then it will eventually draw links.

  2. PR uses graph theory.
    The graph theory branch of mathematics studies the link relationship between nodes in a graph. The web is one of the biggest natural graphs in existence, if not the biggest. Web pages are the graph nodes and hyperlinks are the graph edges. What does this mean to you? Just that because of the nature of the web, and the fact that Google employs a lot of PhDs in math, it’s very likely that the PR algorithm employs graph theory to study the nature of hyperlinks between various sites, to determine what is natural linking and what isn’t. Have you created a link farm? Are the sites linking to you owned by you? What about where you’re linking to? Is there any link collusion, as might happen in a link clique?

  3. The PR of outbound links may be relevant.
    By this I mean the PR of sites you’ve linked to. Google likes for “link neighborhoods” to be formed. It makes their indexing job easier. Linking to a site suggests that you, a human, have attributed some value to that site. Since Google’s job is “to index the world’s information”, they like it when you link out (without being a link farm), provided it’s to relevant sites. And that’s the key: linking to relevant content is likely more important its PR, else new sites would never gain PR. They probably don’t like for unusual linking structures that suggest cliques or collusion, though I’m still unsure of blog network links and how they pass PR value.

  4. The PR of inbound links is relevant.
    It isn’t enough anymore that you get, say, 10 inbound backlinks from other websites to score a PR4 rank. Not only does each link probably have to be from different sites (i.e., at least 10 different sites) but the quality/ trust of each site plays a role in your site’s PR. Obviously, it’s “natural” to have links from sites of different PR, but a link from a blogroll or a site whose main topic is significantly different from yours may be discounted. Editorial links from relevant posts elsewhere are the most valuable, especially if the site has good PR. I say may be because I’m not 100% sure where Google currently draws the line. Google’s algorithm gets smarter all the time and may discount the value of links from sites that you own. (Don’t be surprised if they can figure this out. I can think of several ways, most of which they’re probably already employing.)

  5. Being bidirectional may help PR.
    Linking has to go both ways. A site that links out but has no links in might have a lower priority when it comes to being indexed. It hasn’t established any content authority yet. On the other hand, a site that does not link out at all but gains steady inbound links could be perceived as an “authority” site. Me, I prefer not to to assume this. I think it’s far more natural that a blog is linked bidirectionally, connecting itself into a topical slice of the web. (Though it’s probably ironic that this post does not have many outbound links.)

  6. PR depends on timeliness of link building.
    Gaining inbound backlinks to a new site early on and maintaining is more valuable than having a gap of time where you receive few to no backlinks. It doesn’t seem fair, but if you establish some authority early, it’s a signal to the Googlebot that your site is probably worth indexing regularly. For this reason, it’s important to post very regularly for the first while, until you’ve at least moved from PR0. It’s also important that the speed of your link growth is natural.

  7. PR is logarithmic.
    While Google’s algorithm changes constantly, it appears that it takes about 10 legitimate links to get to a PR4, 100 to get PR5, 1000 for PR6, 10000 for PR7, and so on. That’s a base-10 logarithmic scale. But ignore the math and consider this: it means that it gets much harder to get to the next PR level. What’s more, Google’s idea of what a “legitimate” link is also changing, and more drastically in the rollout at the end of April. That’ll probably continue.

Let’s look a bit further at the last point. Those numbers of links are based on my readings. They may change at any time, or already have changed, judging by some of the strange drops that I’ve witnessed or read other bloggers mention. They’re for illustration purposes only. There’s more to PR building than just getting links, but it’s an important factor.

If you are getting some new backlinks every day because your blog is so fantastic, you can figure out how long it might take you to reach your target PR. For example, one new Google-legitimate link per day will take you about three years to get to PR6 – provided the algorithm hasn’t changed drastically. If you’re not getting even that, it’ll take you a long time to get where you’re going – presumably PR10, because doesn’t everyone want that?

Time to rank in the SERPs pt 1

On the other hand, if you can reduce the time needed to acquire a certain number of links, through various link building strategies, you’re golden. Tubetorial, for example, gains dozens of new links per day (Technorati link listing), thanks highly in part to the free Cutline WordPress theme. It links back to Tubetorial. (If I understand the way Technorati records new links, it does so when someone actually clicks on a link to your site. It won’t show up until then – neither in Technorati nor in your blogging platform’s control panel.) So Tubetorial is gaining links on a much faster curve. The diagram below shows that (not to scale).

Time to rank in the SERPs pt 2

Now I should point out that the bulk of this post was written over two months ago, and Google might discount theme-based links at any time, or they might not. Even if they do, theme links build traffic, which may eventually pay off in editorial links. So don’t discount offering a free theme.

What Can I Do To Increase Links and PR?
This post isn’t intended as a full discourse on building your PR or link building. However, a few pointers:

  1. Deep-link.
    Link into your archives with relevant anchor text. The search engines will give preference to those of your pages that you indicate as being relevant. In other words, if you don’t love your archives, how will they? Doing this will at the very least increase the PR of individual post pages, if not the home page. If you need some help in that regard, and you’re using WordPress, Chris Pearson has some great tips for exposing your archives. (The principles can be applied for other blogging platforms.) Linking into your archives helps expose your older articles and thus new readers will more easily find them. If some of those readers happen to be bloggers, deep linking your site increases the chances that they will link to you. That way, you are increase both internal links and backlinks.

  2. Post great content.
    Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before. This is often overlooked. Don’t just post text. Add images with relevant alt text. Add rich media (audio, video), maps, etc.

In summary, if you have a new blog, it behooves you to start building legitimate links as early as possible. The simplest way to do that is to post great content regularly, deep-link your archives, and promote your site by participating in relevant conversation – either in the comments section of related sites or in relevant forums. Any activity that brings you targeted traffic will eventually bring other bloggers who will link to you if they know your site exists.

Social Voting Help From The Performancing Community

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Need a little nudge on your favorite social voting site? If you post a link to your Reddit, Digg, Netscape, etc. submission in our new social voting forum we’ll vote it up around 9am Eastern time.

Conditions:

1. The link should be a net benefit for the online community (spam will not be promoted)
2. You must post a link to the original article as well as each of the social voting submissions

If you like this idea, feel free to join in on the voting! Hopefully we can all help each other drive more traffic to our sites.

I started things up here:
http://performancing.com/node/6495

3 Reasons Why Snap Preview is Ruining Your Blog, and Hurting Your Readership

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Welcome Digg readers, you can grab this sites RSS Feed here.

Snap’s preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it’s useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

That’s not to say im any better, but it is true. As a group , most bloggers are only a small step away from the flashing, rotating logos of 1997 or the neon pink backgrounds and blaring teen pop auto play bollocks of your average 17yr old MySpace user — and I include myself, though i dont use SPA, im as guilty as the next blogger of “bling envy”.

Let me point out a few truths about Snap Preview Anywhere, in the vain hope that this misguided ‘helper application’ will die a quick death as we all start to see the sense of a usable website as opposed to a trinket magnet for the design challenged.

read on…..

  1. Accidental triggers: When scrolling, or just moving from one element (maybe a link, maybe a photo etc) to another, the unintentional triggering of the SPA popup is distracting, at best. It draws the eye away from the task at hand, and causes annoyance, and loss of concentration — if you’re actually selling anything, pay close attention to this point!
  2. Click stalling: Quite often, when trying to click a link that features the Snap abomination, I have to click several times to get the damn thing to work. This is too much effort. If your site is that hard to use, you can bet I wont be back, and neither will others.
  3. I trust you: No, really I do! Im at your blog, despite like everyone else being really busy, im at your blog! I just want to follow the fucking link ok? Dont crowd me like some over-eager second hand car salesman trying to sell me a dodgy link, just let me see that its a link, read the anchor text and decide if I want to click it. I dont care what the bloody site looks like, if you’re linking to it, that’s good enough for me — really, get out of my face.

Wow, glad I got that off my chest. I’ve had this post in mind for a few weeks but Duncan reminded me, and finally pushed me in the comments of another post.

All joking aside, SPA is not helpful, it’s not cool, and it’s not winning you readers — It’s bling, a silly little shiney thing designed specifically to increase awareness of Snap.com — no bad thng, and certainly an shining example of how to use widgets to gain links and attention, but, come on ladies and gentleman, show a little self restraint, show a little consideration for your users.

Complaints, abuse and protestations of innocence, ignorance or terminal stupidity to my inbox or the comments below 🙂

Laura Scott: BlogHer, pingVision & Drupal – Part 2

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Laura Scott, President of pingVision LLC is a graphic and interactive media designer with a background in print production, television and web. On the eve of the 2006 BlogHer conference and just after upgrading the BlogHer site I posed some questions to Laura and she has provided some great insight. This interview discusses a little about Laura, Drupal and her work with the BlogHer community site.

This is the second part of the interview. Part 1 is also here on Performancing. If you’d like clarification from Laura on any of the points feel free to ask them in the comments and Laura and I will do our best to get you an answer.

How did you get involved with BlogHer?

You may or may not have heard about all the hoopla that happened last year when some major bloggers basically said that no women worth reading were blogging, and that women bloggers weren’t worth reading. “Where are all the women bloggers?” was the plaint from one guy — which was, of course, a ridiculous question to anyone who was actually paying attention to more than their own echo chamber. About half of all the bloggers blogging are women, but you don’t see them in the ubiquitous Top 100 lists and those kinds of things. There are lots of reasons why, and many viewpoints, and I won’t go into that here. But the question seemed to keep coming up every few months.

So early last year, when I saw Lisa Stone and Elisa Camahort’s blog posts where they were musing about throwing a conference to celebrate women bloggers, I thought it was a great idea and I emailed Lisa encouraging her to go for it. As it turns out, I was but one of hundreds of women, and some men, apparently, who loved the idea of such a conference. Lisa and I emailed each other over the months as they were getting the first conference set up.

For the first conference, we hosted an online chatroom using a Flash-based application, as sort of an annex to the actual conference. The software was pretty basic, but we wanted something that would be easy for people, including n00bs, to use, without having to download programs and learn about IRC and all that. It was a lot of fun. We had women all over the world participating in online discussions that roughly paralleled the panel discussions at the conference itself.

After the conference, we approached BlogHer with the idea of building a new community website based on Drupal.

What has your role been since then?

We’ve been web designers, developers and admins for the site. The development has been frozen for the most part since February. After the conference, we’ll be able to do a proper profiling and analysis for an upgrade and addition of new features. I can’t say more about it at this point.

[Greg’s Note: That’s a good hook – I’m certainly looking forward to seeing how BlogHer grows.]

What was it that convinced the women at BlogHer to migrate their working site to a new one? And what has the reaction been to the updated Drupal site?

They knew they needed something more. They were using a Typepad blog for disseminating information — which was very effective. But to build a community, it seemed that Drupal was the natural choice.

I think the main reason was because that’s what I was pushing for. With another developer, they might have gone with another of the main Open Source CMSs. I don’t know.

Any special Drupal modules you implemented, or created during the site implementation?

There were quite a bit of little module hacks — mostly to customize the user interface. A lot of these changes we could have implemented using the locale module, but not all, and we were concerned about the hit on performance with such an approach as the site scaled.

One of the main features of the site is the blogroll. This took some custom queries to the database, drawing on weblink data, and presenting that info in different formats, from “most recently added” lists for each category to paginated alphabetical listings. This is the kind of thing that we hope to roll into a module as a complement/enhancement to the links module package, but we haven’t had the time yet. The upgrade migration path from the weblinks module in 4.6 to the links modules in 4.7 is not quite there yet, so we’ll probably start by helping out with some coding there, although it may be easier to try a migration into CCK and put the displays together using views. We’ll be looking into it after the conference.

Can you quantify the growth of the site in terms of users, nodes, popularity?

Since the site launched beta at the end of January, over 4,000 people have registered and submitted over 4,000 links to the blogrolls. There are over 7,000 nodes on the site. And it doesn’t seem to be slowing down — in fact, it’s picking up. Right now we’re seeing over 16,000 unique visitors a day, and they’re sticking around, looking at many pages per visit, according to the stats. And they’re posting a lot in the forums and comments. Not bad for a site that’s not quite six months old!

What was the tipping point where you decided to get new hardware for the site?

We had a bit of a learning curve here. Lisa, Elisa and Jory may not have been surprised by the traffic — after all, they’ve always been in the middle of the BlogHer phenomenon — but we were not at all prepared for the level of interest the site would garner right off the bat. We had developed the site on a shared server, which probably was a mistake from the start, but this company had been fairly reliable and we had other sites hosted with them that were routinely hitting 10-20,000 pageviews a day without a hiccup. But we had a lot of problems, with multiple crashes. As it turned out, the culprit was a spammer on another site sending out gobs of emails, which kicked up the server load, which had a cascading effect upon BlogHer.

We ended up having to migrate to a virtual dedicated server in a hurry — like overnight — because the web hosting company decided to shut us down, and would not upgrade us because they had cancelled plans for offering dedicated and VPS hosting, which is why we had gone with them in the first place. That was crazy. So one night we had to make a quick migration. We worked with Firebright on that, and they came through for us that night. However, over the following weeks we still had crashes, and found corruption in the database. Once that was fixed, things started to stabilize … until a few weeks ago, as traffic started to push the envelope of the server resources we had dedicated for it.

Because we all expect BlogHer to grow, especially as their Ad Network expands, we thought it was best to scale up in a way that makes it easier to continue scaling. So just a week or so ago, we made the jump to a multi-server setup, again with Firebright.

What is the configuration of the site now? (e.g. multiple web servers-single database server VS. multiple web, multiple read only database).

We’re running on a 1+1 setup: one dedicated web server and one dedicated database server, and are poised to move to a load-balanced setup when the time comes. Once we’ve had time to profile the site and run some optimizations, we’ll have a better idea of what that next step will be, and when.

What Schmidt Isn’t Saying About Click Fraud

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It took me a while to track down this comment from when Google CEO Eric Schmidt originally said that Click Fraud was a “non issue”. Now ZDNet are bringing up the Schmidt quote again in light of recent high profile Click Fraud cases, it’s worth pointing out what he’s not telling you…

Schmid said:

Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen.

But back in March, noted Search marketing expert Greg Boser blew away Schmidts assertions by pointing out that this would depend on all Adwords advertisers tracking ROI on a direct CPA basis:

That doesn’t account for all the big spending advertisers who are bidding to generate leads that won’t produce revenue for quite some time, or advertisiers who are trying to acquire long-term customers. If you remove click fraud for those types of comapnies (who also happen to bid in many of the highest per click spaces) you will not see any of them raise their bids. That money will simply go back into their bank accounts.

And that to me sounds about right. I don’t claim ot be a click fraud expert, but to dismiss it as “self correcting”, whilst appearing to be very neat and clever (particulary as the GOOG biz model depends upon PPC), just doesn’t ring right, and Bosers arguments make a lot of sense in context.

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Will Google Ban the W3C?

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There’s a hilarious kerfuffle building over the internet standards governing body, the Word Wide Web Consortium, who’s members include pretty much anyone who’s anyone in the big league tech/web space, selling pagerank on this page.

What I want to know is, will Google ban the W3C from it’s index for this heinous crime against the Google biz model (as they would anyone else), or will they administer a slap on the wrist a la wordprsss, Financial Times or a host of other high profile “spammers” over the last few years?

Really, this shit just goes beyond funny…

For starters, getting links on a PR9 at W3C is nothing new. For a few years you were able to buy into the supporters (or maybe it was membership, don’t remember exact details) for about $5k i think, and grab a PR8/9 link, but it got so crowded on the page as word spread that people stopped bothering. (those with half an ounce of common sense anyway), and although this page does not appear to be the same one, and although the cost of getting on it is reduced to $1k, it confounds me as to why the hell should this be a problem?

Im sick to death, though clearly still amused and interested, in the whole “ooh oooh, she did something baaaad… Gooooogle, oh Goooooooogle.. ” shit going on. It’s always narked me, and this just annoys the hell out of me. Should the W3C put the ridiculous NoFollow on all their outbound links to supporters just becuase some arses at Google want to spend more time stamping on what’s bad than promoting what’s good?

Hell no, who made Google king of links anyway?

Oh wait, we did…

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Do You Have a Post View Problem?

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I just commented on a thread over at Threadwatch but I thought I would more fully answer the question over here where I can waffle on a bit more. The question was why are Nick Dentons visitor figures and page view figures so close?

The simple fact is most blogs have page view figures that almost match the visitor sessions. This is because

  • Homepage-centric navigation where all the action is on the first page you visit. Browsing the homepage lets you see all the new stuff. If you return every day then there is no need to click any deeper.
  • Defaulting to full post rather than snippets. If you switch to partial content as teasers you force the reader to click through to see the rest of the post, only you can decide if it is worth it as some visitors might not like the change.
  • Success of RSS. If your readers tend to read the RSS rather than visit the blog you will only get post views on those posts where the RSS user has to click through.

So first of all is this a problem?

I would say it’s not a massive problem but it is good to have high page views as it is a metric used to gain advertising (or just as bragging rights). Google Adsense in particular is interested in page views and more and more advertising is going back to CPM (per thousand impressions).

Despite this I do find visits, return and unique visitors far more interesting personally. To me a loyal readership is far far more powerful than search engine visitors that suck up all your archived content and never return. Perhaps this is my old marketing personality asserting itself but unique visitors are potential subscribers and therefore customers. Thing is the two go hand in hand, you need individuals to view many pages. You want to focus on human beings but get them more involved. By creating more stickiness you can get visitors up the loyalty ladder towards creating advocates who spread word of mouth.

It is still worthwhile keeping your visitor involved in your blog for longer. You want your blog to be satisfying and a great resource. This is a primary reason for them to visit again or recommend you. Rarely do people recommend a whole blog on the basis of one good post. How do you get them to dig down further? The way to do this is to show off!

Some bloggers do this by having a “best of” in the page navigation, on one of my blogs I have a “most popular” list. This will serve to catch the eye of readers who arrive at a particular post and wonder what else is good to see.

The best way of achieving more clicks is to inter-link your posts. Talk about other posts that are relevant to the current discussion or have a “related” list at the end of the post. You will get more clicks by embedding the links in the content though, especially if you really sell them. To sell another post lead into it showing some sort of pay-off without giving the whole game away, for example “.. where I discuss ten guaranteed killer post ideas you won’t want to miss”.

Another way of “selling” older posts is to build in this chain of posts by design by creating a series. You will see I do this occasionally here on Performancing with “part 1”, “part 2”, etc. Anyone arriving at part three will more than likely want to read the older posts, especially if you say “you need to know about X which we described in part 1”.

What many people don’t realise is the more interactive your blog is the more page views you will get. Every time a visitor clicks that’s another page view. You could have a directory or host tools for example, we get quite of use out of our private message system between performancing members. Encourage visitors to comment, that is absolutely critical. A commented blog is often a healthy blog. They will return to see if there are any replies too, increasing your visits as well as page views. Polls and surveys too work for increasing page views and can even serve to produce content to blog about.

Having said all of this, page view numbers are not something to get into a knot about, the most important thing is your readership and if it is increasing. The best way to get a good readership is great content well publicised, if you concern yourself with anything that would be it.

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Feedburner Need to Stop Hijackings

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This morning, like a few others I would imagine, I was duped into unsubscribing from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It wasn’t untill I got to my friend Graywolfs post that I even realized I’d been had. This is a problem Feedburner need to sort out immediately.

I’ll refrain from saying “it’s an easy fix”, as running a couple of large tools/services has taught me that things are rarely as simple as most users imagine, but the idea of just not letting someone resuse a feed url is fairly simple, so hopefully they’ll be able to sort it out sooner rather than later.

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