Financial & Travel Musings

This one is quite a difficult call.

When I moved the original blog to it’s permanent home, I made the decision not to include it as part of our main website on the basis that 1) I’d not always be writing about things relevant to that site and 2) it would give me a lot more freedom in what I did write.

Both worked very well and let me use the site for sponsored posts which I’d not really have been able to do had it been part of our main site, or at least not with nearly so much freedom as I was able to. On the downside though, that blog now has nearly 70,000 inbound links and the main site has just over 2,000. That 70k is quite a staggering number considering that the sum total spent on promoting the blog was $23 vs quite a considerable amount on the main site.

As I say though, it wouldn’t have been possible to do all of those posts within the context of the main site but even so there would have been tens of thousands of links more than I actually have.

What is clear is that blogs do tend to attract a lot of inbound links from search engines. Part of that is from the daily writing of new posts each of which is, of course, a webpage in its own right. However, it’s the crosslinking and categorisation that really bumps up the number of links and we’re seeing a similar effect on a non-blog site that we launched last year which has some of those cross-linking characteristics.

As something of an experiment in this area, I’ve just launched a miniblog (ie one that’ll not get updated daily) on our listings site to see how the links grow from the current total of around 6,000 inbound links.

Popularity: 63% [?]

Google’s business is founded on academic research dating back to the early 1990s which sought to improve on how search engines of the time operated by going beyond the keyword and directory driven models of the time.

Most of that original research is still valid in the context of the algorithm which they use today so it’s useful to look at a few of the features which they mentioned back then as we can still take advantage of them:

1. The model assumes that pagerank is what’s represented by a hypothetical random surfer going from site to site; the probability that he hits a given page being that page’s pagerank.
2. A page could have high pagerank if a lot of pages pointed to it.
3. Anchor text in links to a site is used in addition to the content of the page.
4. Google keeps location information and uses this to make use of proximity in returning search results.
5. Words in larger or bolder font are weighted higher than normal text. Although it doesn’t mention header tags (these arrived after their initial research) it’s usually assumed that these are significant in the present day algorithm.

You may have spotted a few weaknesses in how their algorithm works from the above which you could potentially exploit, but if not, here’s a few ideas:

1. Install the google toolbar and visit your own pages whenever you get the chance and use your own homepage as the default start-up page on your browser. They counter this to some extent ie it’s not worthwhile just sitting and clicking on your own site all day.
2. Get as many links to your page as you can. It’s possible to get, potentially, 600,000 via some directory submission services for under $40. Also, add a link back to your own homepage from all of your pages. The really devious can even create massive sites with links back to a single page or artificial sites generated by databases to the same effect. As with the first point, they have a weighting factor to counteract this so, for example, a link from yahoo is worth more than a link from arnoldstewart.net although one wonders what the effect might be if I were to create, say, a million page website with links to a single page?
3. When someone asks how they should link to you, include the keywords in the anchor text, not the name of your site. Do the same thing with links from your own site to the homepage.
4. Host your site where your customers live.
5. Use keywords in header tags, larger font sizes and bold fonts.

How little the basic core of the algorithm has changed can be seen by the severity of the crackdown by google on links from sponsored blog posts ie all of the above remain relevant.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Last year I thought that I’d try out some of the manual directory submission services that are quite widely advertised these days.

Looking round I found loads of them then (and there are more now) which offered to submit your site mostly to between 100 and 500 directories. At the lower end of that range you could get around 200 directories for $30 which is certainly worth it when you consider how much time it would take you to submit your site to 200 directories. Even aside from the sheer boredom factor, you could be developing your site with the time saved (which is considerable). At that time the top end of the range seemed to be around 2000 directories. Few places ran to that number and it was quite expensive.

Move on to this year and the prices have dropped considerably with 500 directories now available for $50 (ie 10c/directory vs the 30c/directory of the 200 submission from last year) and the services expanded considerably. It’s now commonplace to see social networking submissions and blog submissions on offer whereas both were a relative rarity last year. Article submissions are also available but still fairly expensive although I plan to try out one of the low end packages on one or two domains as an experiment.

However, what’s most striking is that the number of directories on offer has gone up. Whereas last year 500 directories was generally the peak, 2000 and 3000 are quite common now and I saw one yesterday offering 600,000. Yes, six hundred thousand! OK, that’s an automated submission service rather than a manual one, but where did they come up with a list of 600,000 directories?

Although I’m quite sure that many of that 600,000 are junk directories, since that particular package only costs $40, I’ve put one of my domains in for it. What is worrying me somewhat though is the sheer number of acknowledgement emails that I may get from it. Certainly if even 1% of the directories use the “click to confirm” plugin, I may find that I need to employ someone to do the confirmations!

Popularity: 23% [?]