Square Galaxy » SEO

Pagerank update wasn’t nice to me

Jacob — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:56:49 +0000

When Google calculates the importance of a page, they use an ranking algorithm known as Pagerank to produce a numerical value for the page. We don’t know very much about Google’s Pagerank algorithm, except that it is complicated and evaluates lots of criteria, such as number of links, quality of page, and freshness.

Every once in a while Google exports their Pagerank values into a database that can be accessed by the Google Toolbar (also available as a bundled download with the Firefox browser). When Google performs such an update, people can see the Pagerank value for a particular site or page.

The latest export is currently underway, and I’ve noticed that the new Pagerank values for some of my sites and pages have been kind of disappointing. For example, I was excited when my main blog was promoted from a 4 to a 5 during the last Pagerank update, but has now fallen to a 3. This technical blog has fallen from a 3 to a 2, and my other blogs have stayed at about a 3 or 2.

I blame the lack of freshness of my blogs. During the last Pagerank update, I was blogging a new post almost every day. During the last three months, this has slowed down considerably, as blogging isn’t as important as it used to be for me. As a result, my Pagerank is down. This is too bad, but I’m not devaluing my life because of it.

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Main blog now has Pagerank of 5

Jacob — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:43:03 +0000

So my main blog at http://jacob.peargrove.com/blog now seems to have a Google pagerank of 5. Google gives each page in its index a score from 0 to 10 depending on many different things. For a personal blog to be given a pagerank of 5 is pretty significant. Ever since I’ve been checking the pagerank of my site with the Firefox Google Toolbar it has been at PR-4. Having a higher pagerank might also explain the increased amount of traffic I’ve been seeing to my site. October (already, so far) as seen more unique visitors than any previous month.

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How to promote a secret site

Jacob — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 07:55:22 +0000

Last Friday, the thirteenth, I announced that I created a secret blog. I want it to be searchable from at least two major search engines, probably Google and Yahoo!, because I’m not such a fan of MSN or whatever they are calling it these days. I’ve created site maps and I’ve submitted them to both Google and Yahoo, and I see a little bit of downloading, but no results in their search indexes. I’ve used ping-o-matic to alert sites as to the existence of new posts, but I get very little response.

Now I’m sure that eventually I will get indexed, but how many days will that take? Especially because there are no links to my site. I can’t link to my secret blog here, because then it really wouldn’t be secret. I can’t link to it from any of my other sites I control, because that would risk giving away the location of my secret blog. And I can’t ask any of my friends to link to it from their sites, because then they will know my secrets, and that could be a bad thing if any of my secrets ever involved them.

So this is an interesting little case study. How do you promote a site from scratch? And how long will it take?

Most blogs and forums out there will add no-follow flags to all out going links as a method to combat spam. So just getting on public forums and blogs probably won’t do anything. The only thing I can think of is go around to other very random people’s blogs and leave well thought out comments and hope that they will think my secret blog is interesting enough to link to. But this is a very long and hard process, but the only one I can think of that doesn’t involve shady spam-like techniques. Maybe you have some ideas.

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