Our little web forum is growning slowly and building speed. It’s interesting how these things work out – exponetial growth, but as always its so hard to get the initial members in the first place. Exponential growth systems are facinating, it works like this: A site that has say 100 members has 10 times the refereal power of a site that has 10 members. By that I mean a percentage of each member is likely to invite someone to join or tell other people about the site (or indeed link to the site). A site with 1000 members has 10 times the referal power of a site with 100 members. The more members you have, the more members you get. This is what makes sites like Facebook and MySpace so massive. Well our site has only a few members at the moment but every day there are a few more, lets see how things pan out.
It seems to me that many sites have recently showed a slight drop in Alexa rank lately. Facebook as mentioned in my last post has slowed down slightly and I have noticed this on many other big sites. Is Alexa tweaking the way it analyses statistics? I’m losing interest in Alexa rankings to be honest, but this is something I will keep an eye on.
Facebook fascinates me, not because of the countless annoying messages I get on it about quizzes and vampire fights, but because of its exponential growth. This exponential growth pattern occurs because the more members it has, the more people are referred, and the cycle continues. However I believe this may be about to change.
Having signed up myself a few months ago, I am now totally bored with the site. I’m not the only one either, many people I have spoken to have said the same thing. Facebook was very fun at first but is now a bit tedious.
There is a possible downturn in traffic too. Please see below.
It is widely known that Alexa is not very accurate at measuring the traffic levels for smaller sites, but for one of the major contenders such as Facebook, we can assume these statics are fairly reflective of the overall traffic trends.
It could be a seasonal trend, maybe every December sites such as Facebook received lower traffic, possibly because people are preparing for Christmas, who knows. It is interesting to note that MySpace.com does not have the same downturn. Personally I think Facebook could be in trouble.
Before I get started on this, let me answer some of the comments I will undoubtedly have if I don’t state this: Yes I know Google Page Rank isn’t as important as it once seemed. It puzzles me why, whenever I talk about Google Page Rank I get at least one person telling me how unimportant it is, well if its so unimportant why do you care so much? I do believe Google is playing down the value of Page Rank recently especially because people have attempted (with varying success) to change their page rank by buying links from others. However, as they are the World’s leading authority on search engine placement, forgive me if I show a little interest in how they measure the value of a page and its content. And yes, I do realise that Google PR does not seem to directly affect search engine results and traffic.Right, that’s out of the way, now I can get down to business.
Why do I think this?
Ok, the site I am talking about is our online portfolio for artists website, Voodoochilli.net. For years the site has had a Google Page Rank of 5, but a few months ago this went down to 4. I understand that Google has done some updates recently and that the measurement of Page Rank is probably logarithmic meaning that a Page Rank of 5 is much higher than a Page rank of 4. I also realise that these Page Ranks aren’t fixed numbers, the more websites that have Page Rank the harder it is to compete. I should also point at that we have not lost any considerable amount of traffic since the Page Rank was reduced.
I have a few reasons to believe that our site might have been penalised. Firstly it does surprise me that the Page Rank has reduced when in fact the site has many more back links than previously. According to Google’s Webmaster Tools the home page has thousands of relevant back links and many of them are from PR5 and PR 4 websites. Being a community website, it’s nature is to grow, and the amount of incoming links also grows with it. Indeed the site appears to be growing at around 150% every year.
My second reason for suspecting that Google may have penalised the site is that all of the links I have in the Google Directory no longer show any page rank, whereas other peoples sites do. This is consistent with what I have heard happening to other people that have been penalised 1 Page Rank point.
My third point is an interesting one. I have lost the link now, but in my web statistics logs there was record of a lot of incoming links from Googles server – I am not sure if it was someone else’s Web Master Tools account or the discussion groups on Google, but for some reason, there was a lot of traffic coming from Google regarding our website (and we are not talking about your usual search engine traffic). I suspect someone reported our site for having paid links – something it used to have.
Why would Google have Penalised me?
As mentioned above, the site used to have paid links. I was never aware that this was a problem and certainly didn’t think Google would penalise because of it. The fact that there is a link in Googles Webmaster tools to report other sites that are selling paid links means that Google doesn’t like this one bit.
Google States:
“We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRankâ„¢” in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.
Google uses a number of methods to detect paid links, including algorithmic techniques. We also welcome information from our users. If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We’ll investigate your submissions, and we’ll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.â€
I can see the reasoning behind this – Why should people be able to buy their way up to the top? I guess the flip-side argument would be – Why shouldn’t someone that’s worked hard building up their site be allowed to sell links on their site? Some people in the SEO world have speculated that this whole issue is to play down the value of other text link exchanges schemes leaving Google with a clear monopoly.
Where to go from Here?
I have removed all references to advertising on that website, with the exception of Google’s own Adsense programme. I have contacted Google via the “Request reconsideration†link in Webmasters’s tools and I am eagerly awaiting their reply. Who knows, maybe they will tell me it hasn’t been penalised and I am getting worried about nothing. I have also been on the discussion boards, but no one has given me an answer yet.
I would be very interested to hear other peoples experiences on this.
Ever noticed than Internet Explorer seems to render PNG files a slightly different colour that firefox and other browsers? It’s due to the fact that explorer doesn’t handle the gamma properly. Well there is a work around, simply use this tool and delete the gamma. Simple as! Took me a while to find out that though!
I recently wrote a piece about off-line promotion for the Creative Coding website.
Here’s a small section:
Having a fantastic website is all very well and good, but if no one knows that it exists then it is a complete waste of time and money. As one forum member’s signature used to say “If no one knows about your site, the launch will be as successful as a lemonade stand smack dab in the middle of the Sahara Desert.” It is all too easy to think that a few meta tags is going to get your site to the top of Google. There have been numerous discussions on the forum about the use of meta keywords and the general consensus is that meta keywords carry little, if any, weight any more. The debate is on-going so to be on the safe side I still use them, but I don’t rely on them.
The process of search engine optimisation is a big one, and something that will not be discussed here. In fact, one of the main points I am going to try and get across is that you shouldn’t rely solely on search engines for traffic. Here I am going to tell you some ways of promoting your website without even thinking about Google.
Recently we interviewed Shaun Taylor, creator of the fantastic homebrew application DSOrganize. I found the results of the interview an insight into the mind of a serious software developer. Feel free to check it out here.
I just wanted to share the results gained from using Google new Website Optimizer Tool. I set up an experiment on www.voodoochilli.net
the experiment consisted of a change of graphic, simply increasing the brightness of the register button slightly to make it a more prominent feature to see if more people would register on the site.
The results were quite remarkable, at 108% over the original graphic.
Voodoochilli isn’t about making money, but I can imagine that this tool could be very effective in optimising content for that purpose.
Please note I have blurred some of the results as I don’t want competing sites to have complete access to this data.
What is link bait and where can I get some?
As I am sure you already know, having lots of relevant inbound links to your site can greatly increase the amount of traffic your site receives. Not only do you receive more traffic from the link source itself, but you will also gain a better position in search engines which will in turn increase your organic results. Simply put, link popularity increases Google page rank and other search engines’ ranking factors.
Link baiting is the SEO technique used to encourage other websites to link to you. Below I have listed some of the best ways of doing this:
All of the above named methods have one thing in common – there is incentive for people to link to you: they get something out of it. If you write a truly original article, people are going to use it as a reference or source of information. If you offer a useful online tool it goes without saying people will link to it.
Another important consideration at this point is to make it easy for people to link to you. You could provide easy to use copy and paste code which has your logo or graphic, along with the link and any anchor text. A great place to get links from are online communities and social bookmarking sites such as digg, reddit, furl and del.icio.us.
The very nature of online communities allows for the exponential growth of the sharing of information, resources and tools.
An easy way to let people bookmark you.
Have a look at the little widget below.
Pretty cool hey?
I have started using this on most of my sites now and have found it very effective. Simply go to addthis.com to download your copy for free. By the way, you might notice that what addthis.com have done is create link bait in the form of a useful little tool. Clever idea, now why didn’t I think of that? It is in the interest of people to use the tool, it encourages traffic for the site owner and the developers have received a ton of traffic in return from such a simple idea.
Be careful who links to you.
Having loads of inbound links is great, but some of them can damage your SEO efforts. Links from disreputable link farms, warez and porn sites can be damaging because search engines such as Google penalise these results. Also sites that copy your content while linking to you can damage results. A good thing to do is use the major search engines to see who is linking to you, and if you don’t like the look of what you see, send them an email and hopefully they will remove it.
Recently, one of my sites had a sudden drop in visitors. I know no reason why this has happened and I am pretty sure its only temporary (lets hope!). It has happened before and has always recovered. Anyway instead of sulking about it I decided to do a bit of research into why this could be, and ways to improve conversions on the current traffic levels just in case it can’t be fixed.
I after a couple of hours of reading through other blogs and development websites I felt I was getting nowhere. I checked my statistics and looked for clues to what could be causing it. Nothing.
Later on I decided to log into my Google Adwords account. To my surprise I find a new tool called Google Website Optimizer. After watching the tutorial I was very impressed.
To put it simply, the new software (which is currently in beta version) enables web masters to make subtle design and content variations and monitor their impact on goals. For example, you could change the strap line on your page and a graphic which may have an impact on sales.
I have only just started my first experiment using this software, but I am very hopeful that it will help me learn more about the visitors to my sites. Typical Goggle Genius, such a simple idea!
I have been reading a great usability book titled “Don’t make me think†which has changed my views on web user behaviour. Instead of reading though a page content, most users are simply looking for something plausible to click: people don’t have time to read though pages of sales pitch before making a purchase or registering with a site.
Apparently they want to know what the site is, what’s in it for them and where to click.
Hopefully I will be able to test out this theory by using this new tool. I will post the results when I have them. In the meantime, give the software a look yourself. I would be interested to know how you get on!
