Page Rank 0 to 4 in Under Four Months, How I did it | Hacker News Reader

Page Rank 0 to 4 in Under Four Months, How I did it

blog.whyspam.me

98 pointsthinkbohemian56 comments

Really well written article, thanks for sharing. One thing I would change though:

"It is hosted under blog.whyspam.me because a subdomain’s PR goes towards the main site."

In my research and experience, its more beneficial for SEO to host your blog at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of blog.mydomain.com. The reason being that Google treats subdomains as different sites.

You're still linking from the blog to the main site, so a good bit of PageRank will pass through, but you might have an even better impact were the blog hosted on the same subdomain.

Cheers!

That's my understanding too. We just moved our blog from blog.menuism.com to http://www.menuism.com/blog/ - hoping to see some gains from it.

just checked and apparently blog.whyspam.me is only PR3 looks like you could be right.

Most people don't seem to realize that PageRank is per page, not a site wide value. So it makes sense that the front page of your blog has a different PR than your homepage.

See Matt Cutts for more about subdomain versus subdirectory: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

I would prefer to use blog.mydomain.com and then do a 301 redirect to bring all Google juice into the main domain.

301 redirects don't pass 100% link juice so why waste backlinks to a subdomain that you don't plan on actually using? Are you just saying have it available as a convenience thing in case someone tries to guess your blog URL?

Is that true? what about 302 redirects?

As far as the guessing for blog name if your 404 pages are good enough it won't matter, for me if you go to http://whyspam.me/blog they'll still see the link to the blog, even though you're viewing a 404 page.

Avoid 302 redirects, they pass no PageRank.

301's do dampen PageRank as well, though the exact amount is not known. I've always put it around 10-15% (i.e., after each 301 you are left with 85% of the original value). I also suspect that its contextual - so a 301 from www.mydomain.com to mydomain.com would probably be dampened less than a 301 to a completely different domain (e.g., bit.ly).

This is the process I took to get to page rank 4 from january to april. Before this I've never had a page rank 4 website, so while i'm sure I could do this again in much less time, I wanted to give those getting started an idea of what they can do to improve their PR, and demystify the whole process. With so many articles like "PR5 in 5 days", it can be demoralizing to not see results for awhile.

I did not spend a full 4 months on SEO alone either. I have another full time job, and was also working on usability studies etc. Enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions!

not to sound negative, but Google doesn't update the public PR information in real time...they do it once every ~4-5 months. So your "PR jumped to 1" "PR jumped to 2" etc doesn't hold much water. I'm guessing you just saw that PR jumped to 4, so you extrapolated your efforts backwards.

The update in PR was from the corresponding jumps I saw on my search keywords in google webmasters as well as actual PR. I saw 0 in december/january, and then noticed a jump of search rankings in feb. In late march my page rank was actually observed as 3 and then in april around the 6th I saw that my PR was reported as 4. Which was accompanied by another jump in my keyword rankings.

Update - I put a note at the bottom of the article to better reflect how I got the numbers.

I guess I would question the value in striving for high PR. Modern SEO is far more about engaging with the social scene than hunting down obscure link directories/blogs.

If you have a cool service, then find a way to get people to tweet about it. imho, a far more relevant way to drive awareness.

ShadyEmail has a component of that, it encourages you to email your friends with a shady address. But by and large I get much more traffic from google than through random twitter links, etc (Of course this could just mean that i need to spend more time on this type of social marketing).

Viral-marketing & social marketing is still just marketing, i've been behind the scenes on a few campaigns that "went viral" and though they fail readily if you don't have the content to support them, even good content needs to be driven to critical mass before it catches on. Even then it dies out quickly without someone pushing the iniative.

I don't think any one approach is right or wrong, but for me Facebook+Twitter drive 3-4x more traffic to my site than Google. Getting good google "juice" is important, but not as important as it was a few years ago.

Google can send you a ton of high value traffic. Getting on Google page 1 can be done (almost) by yourself, without having to convince others to tweet, blog, share on facebook, etc. Plus, once you're there, it takes very little effort to stay, as compared with staying relevant in the social web.

Social is the hot thing right now, but when you're starting at zero, SEO is still a great way to bootstrap yourself to decent traffic.

I couldn't agree more.

Yep, the bursty, generally curious (rather than intentful) traffic from social media links absolutely pales in comparison with the consistent, large, and high-converting amount of traffic Google can send.

Social media is much better at engaging with customers to get feedback and figure out where the holes in your product are.

Not actually that impressive, as Page Rank is an exponential scale.

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/07/24/climbing-page-...

Good link, i like the graph. As i've mentioned in previous comments, i'm not trying to impress, just inform. It maybe obvious to you what is needed to go up in page rank, but it wasn't obvious to me, so i did some research and now here I am!

Of course it's an exponential scale. Otherwise Facebook and Google would be 10, Twitter and major corporate sites would be 2 and the rest of us would all be 0.

When I first started writing at my site, I got to PR 4 in about 6 months or so. And I didn't really check my score for about four months.

My strategy was really simple: produce good content, and the readers (and links) will come. Nothing more, nothing less (well ... maybe a few common-sense initial tweaks at the start, like readable-permalinks and Google-friendly sitemaps). So maybe this isn't the most efficient way of scoring a high PR, but I believe that good content is more valuable in the long run than a artificially boosted good position in a search engine.

Good content drives good SEO, and good SEO drives people to your good content. It really is a chicken-and-egg scenario when it comes to search engine optimization. Ultimately is no way to artificially boost your position for long, and your content will have to drive visitors.

The site is also listed in dmoz.org (almost impossible to get included in these days)

The biggest part of "how he did it" was creating something people wanted to share and link too. The feature on killerstartups got him past PR2, which I haven't been able to do after a year on any of my sites. Then Shady Email got him to 4.

It was much less hard work than I was hoping, it was much more the development of a fun idea related to another previously successful site, Shady URL

If you get your link included in a number of directories and that number is greater than the number of outgoing links you should be able to at least get up to PR3 without much difficulty. If not, use google webmaster to see if your site is being flagged for doing something wrong.

almost impossible to get included in these days

Not true! I've been included within the past year or so. It took a year before I was actually included, sure. But it's not impossible. I have no reason to believe I was merely lucky.

DMOZ is unfortunately inundated with requests for inclusion, the editors are all volunteers, and it takes a significant amount of time and effort to properly review a site for inclusion. (I used to be an editor, my category had a backlog of 150 sites when I joined)

Richard, thank you for writing this up.

I have two questions and a minor bug report for you:

1) It seems you were tracking your Page Rank closely in this time period. Can you quantify the relationship between PR and actual rank or organic search traffic on your site? (I.e., do you know and can you share stats like "At PR N I had X organic search visitors per month"?). This will be obviously be different from site to site (as it depends on query frequency) but these would be interesting data to see.

2) I didn't take the time to watch the video, but you can briefly explain what WhySpamMe is? Is this essentially mailinator except with forwarding to your actual email address? (That's not a knock on WhySpamMe, I'm just trying to understand it. I actually think that's an interesting twist.)

3) Just FYI, I noticed that on an earlier post on your blog (http://blog.whyspam.me/index.php/2010/02/13/whyspam-me-suppo...) you misspelled "Haiti" as "Hati" a couple of times. For that matter, I think "Unicef" should be "UNICEF" (all caps), as it is an acronym. That's the way they seem to spell it officially (although their logo is all lower case, so go figure.)

1) I'm planning another article later with some stats and some notes on usability (specifically about how adding the video you didn't watch lead to a huge increase in conversions).

2) I don't like comparing services to other services "the facebook of dog kennels!" but yes we act much like mailinator though we forward the emails to your actual email account. This is much more convenient IMHO and since the email accounts never expire you can use it for services you actually care about such as amazon.com etc.

What mailinator and the others don't do is keep track of which websites send you unsolicited spam, or sell your info. We keep track of this and publish it to http://whyspam.me/websites.

3) Thanks, there's a reason I became an engineer and not an english major ^_^ I'll fix the spelling as soon as i get a chance.

Anything less than a PR6 isn't really spectacular.

You sound like you're probably not a part of the target audience for this article.

Agreed. My site went from 0-3 in about 6 months and I did absolutely nothing (and I mean nothing, I just wanted to write so I haven't considered SEO even a little) except write some blog articles.

Great, just a little more work and you can get PR4 with not much problem!

It may not be "impressive" but you can't get to PR6 without getting to PR4 first. Everyone has to start form somewhere.

Once you get to around PR4, I think you start appearing in a decent proportion of the searches that are relevant, especially given Google's increasing de-emphasis of pagerank. I started appearing in most of the searches I'd consider relevant for one site of mine as soon as it got up to PR2. Heck, there are relatively well-known universities that are only PR5!

I've never really paid attention to PR (although apparently my blog is sitting at 4 without trying anything, which is kind of neat), but I'd really like to see is a graph of Page Rank over time. Does such a service exist? I doubt it would be easy to do so for any arbitrary page, but even a way to add my site to it and check it occasionally (perhaps get email alerts when the status changes?) would be cool.

"During March, i was featured in killerstartups.com, i saw a big spike in traffic, and resulted in a lot of ‘me too’ articles from other websites in other languages."

If you ever want a few dozen free visitors and some links, submit to KillerStartups - their ridiculous posting schedule means that they write about pretty much anything you submit, in my experience.

I launched Penolo (a twitter app for sharing sketches: http://penolo.com) a little under 3 weeks ago; it's already PageRank 4 (if you can believe the checkers).

Didn't do any link-building, just happened.

I guess give people a reason to link to you: saves you a few months of effort.

I should point out, I linked to it from my personal site, which is a Pagerank 5, and probably didn't hurt... :)

Wish i had some PR 5 sites under my belt.

My site, Feedback Army is PR5. I still don't get that much of my traffic from search engines.

Did you check the search volumes for the topics you cover? Did you look to see that your content includes the most popular keywords for that content? Do you have a lot of content? PR is just a modifier... you still have to have the things that people are searching for for them to come to your site.

I'm working on the content. I have a blog on a subdomain which is just PR3 right now. The blog of course is more diverse with the content. I wrote a post about once a week and put some time into what I write. I'm giving it a year (started in Jan) of posting once a week to see what effect it has. Just from the few posts that have done well, it has been worthwhile so far.

I'd say that SEO and page rank are good things to have but they're not going to be sole (or majority) drivers of traffic for everyone. So it's good to think about other forms of marketing too.

I had a period of time where I was very interested in SEO. Mostly because I thought I saw an easy path to more traffic and more sales. I put some time and effort in (keyword picking, optimizing parts of my site, blah blah) and saw some changes but nothing I'd consider too worthwhile. This led me to where I'm at now, focus on content and let the rest happen.

If that's the case use tools such as wordtracker's to see if the keywords that you're targeting get enough traffic. You could also be competing on some keywords where your competition has a higher PR. Or possibly the customers you want simply don't think to use search engines to find your type of service. What percentage of your traffic comes from search engines?

I've looked at Google's Keyword Tool and tried a bunch of different possibilities. There are certain keywords I'm targeting but despite my PR5 pagerank, I'm not at the top of the page on these yet. So it's a slow move forward. Still people continue to write about FBA so I expect this is a long term investment. As my site gets more quality links and longevitiy, I expect one day I may see more search traffic for the terms I'm targeting. Just not yet. A lot of the search traffic I get is people searching for feedback army by name. I take this as an encouraging sign about awareness of the product itself.

I think that is good as well. Generally a large portion of my traffic is direct traffic. Most visitors when they discover my site have a need to generate a email address, but the next day or later that afternoon many will go directly to my url. I typically see a spike in users the day after i see a spike in traffic. All this SEO stuff can certainly take a long time and not seem to be paying off, FBA seems like a great service that I would like to use in some upcoming usability reviews. Just hang keep up the good work, and one day you'll be #1

Or...give people a reason to link to you and do a little work to get incoming links.

There are plenty of stories of people who had success just fall into their lap, but the vast majority have to work for it.

The whole "build it and they will come" story is fun to tell, but c'mon people, let's all be serious: marketing is at least 1/2 the work of building a successful site. Ignoring that only hurts you.

http://blog.kadavy-inc.com/ got on the front page of HN one time, and became PR4 almost instantly. I did link this blog to my personal site, which is a PR4 - however, that site does not link back.

You need to do some backlinking and other things to make sure you keep your pagerank otherwise after a while it will fall back. I have been up to a 6 and have fallen back for a 4.

Well, so much for that. Now Google Chrome and Twitter both think my site serves malware. Anybody know what to do about this?

where are you getting that from, check out http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://bl...

google says everything is working ok

If any SEOs are out there reading this, we're looking for a consult at my startup. Check profile.

What do you need help with exactly? Happy to help

How does he know his Page Rank score? I didn't know such values were made public.

It's not a secret at all. The Google Toolbar will tell you.

http://toolbar.google.com/

And while it's telling you the pagerank it's sending your entire browsing history* and then some back to google so the can store it in the google cave.

*probably minus https/intranet sites

Easier way http://www.prchecker.info

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