Improbable PageRank facts

I have been working like crazy in the past few days and I wasn’t able to write anything… until now.

Alright, so I’ve got two domains that were launched almost at the same time 1 month apart. Fresh domains. No links pointing to them. PageRank of 0(zero).

I took the same steps of adding these sites to Google and launching them (more on that on another post).

In a future article I will write about Google Webmaster Tools, Sitemap submission, Preffered domain form and other basic SEO stuff.

One domain, let’s call it A, is an online portfolio website with a few about us pages, some contact information, privacy policy and a couple of portfolio items listed on one page.

The other one, let’s call this one B, is also some kind of a portfolio site, but for drawings. It gets daily updates with one new drawing per day, the only SE recognizable text on each page beeing the image’s title and date of posting.

Let’s sum up some facts about the 2 domains:

Along came the July 24 TBPR (ToolBar PageRank) update, which was mostly fixing penalties given on the January TBPR update to directories and link farms.

So guess what:

Domain A gets a PageRank of 1 (before the TBPR it had zero);

Domain B gets a PageRank of 4 (before the TBPR it had 0) !! This is the site with no-text in it; it seemed strange at first.

At the time of the writing (that’s in September 2008), the domains keep their above PageRanks (no TBPR update since July), but:

Domain A (PR=1) gets 2576 visits in September(days 1-12), of which 41 came from Google searches;

Domain B(PR=4) gets 294 visits in September(days 1-12), of which 2 came from Google searches;

So let’s do some simple math:

Domain A: 0.015% visits came from Google (PR 1 site)

Domain B: 0.006% visits came from Google (PR 4 site)

Which in my mind means that PR is not directly related to the traffic on the site, nor that the traffic a site gets from Google is directly related to it’s direct traffic, a metric that could be measured with the Google Toolbar.

I can draw some conclusions at this point:

- PageRank is not directly related to the traffic on your site (bigger PR does not mean more traffic hence more visits); this is somewhat logical because the traffic on your site depends on all 3 primary sources(direct/search engines/refering sites) and also on the topic of your site;

- PageRank doesn’t seem to depend on any of the most important SEO guidelines that you can implement in your sites and that you probably know of from all the blogs/sites/books etc you’ve read them in;

- PageRank does not seem to be directly influenced by the number of incoming links (this is more of a hunch because I didn’t have an astounding difference of incoming links between the 2 sites);

- PageRank DOES seem to be influenced by the quantity (and most certainly quality) of new, fresh and unique content on the site (even if the content consists of IMAGES). That means that you can get a higher PR from adding any kind of content as long as it’s original.

That’s about it ! Of course I have worked with a relatively small set of data in a short time span, but maybe the two most important, logical and well-known facts are:

- CONTENT IS KING ! Add more content, be original, have periodicity (I’ve got to learn this one ); add as much content as you can, but not too much. If you have 10 articles today and only 2 tomorrow, don’t add 10 today ! Add 6 or 7 and keep the other ones for tomorrow; this of course does not apply on news.

- LINKS ! Get as much incoming links as you can, but like with content, not all at once; some of them will count towards your pages’ PR, some of them won’t. Incoming links from pages/sites with related topics to your own count MORE ! DON’T SPAM general topic forums; it’s for your own good.

If you have knowledge or information on this subject, please share it with the rest of us ! Also I can provide more detailed analytics data to anyone that is interested.

Care to comment?!

The PPC tool I always forget about

I’m no expert in PPC marketing or Google Adwords. I’m just starting out, I learned the ropes and now I’m trying to learn campaign optimization.

When building ad copy I always tend to forget that I can scout out the competition very easy with the Google Ad Preview Tool.

This tool is great because:

• You can’t click by mistake on your own ads thus losing money
• You can see ads from a specific geographic region (country,state,city) or even coordinates
• You can select the language you want to target
• You can select the Google domain to use (.com, .co.uk etc)
• You can see even the ads that do not appear on the first search page

I can’t think of any other at the moment. Do you ?

Also if you know any other usefull Adwords tool please share it to the rest of us.

A little user-agent history for you

I came upon this post www.webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ and I laughed…

They present the chaos of user-agent strings in a quick and funny way.

Be sure to read it if you have the time.

Also I want to add the following statements.

There are a lot of user agents out there and I’m not talking only about the browsers.

There are different versions of useragent for each browser, version of a browser, certain plugins installed in a browser and so on.

Some good folks wrote plugins like User Agent switcher which allows you to fake your user agent from within firefox.

I find one particular site interesting, user-agents.org which lists all known user agents, by the way the Search Engines also have their own Google for example having around 7 of them.

By the way, did you know that Mozilla stands for Mosaic Killer ? I am shocked that all this time that I’ve been using Mozilla based browser I didn’t know this.