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

http://blog.whyspam.me/index.php/2010/04/16/page-rank-0-to-4-in-under-four-months/

by thinkbohemian • 16 years ago

98 56 16 years ago

blog.whyspam.me

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!

djhomeless2• 16 years ago

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.

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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.

djhomeless2• 16 years ago

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.

MicahWedemeyer2• 16 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.

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

I couldn't agree more.

ericd3• 16 years ago

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.

shadowsun7• 16 years ago

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.

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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.

spxdcz2• 16 years ago

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.

spxdcz2• 16 years ago

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

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

Wish i had some PR 5 sites under my belt.

MicahWedemeyer2• 16 years ago

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.

qeorge2• 16 years ago

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!

justinchen• 16 years ago

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.

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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

drm2372• 16 years ago

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/

csomar• 16 years ago

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

drm2372• 16 years ago

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?

brandnewlow• 16 years ago

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

ApolloRising2• 16 years ago

What do you need help with exactly? Happy to help

vaksel• 16 years ago

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.

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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.

fuzzmeister• 16 years ago

"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.

spokey• 16 years ago

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.)

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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.

kadavy2• 16 years ago

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.

gscott• 16 years ago

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.

kadavy2• 16 years ago

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

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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

google says everything is working ok

BrandonFletcher• 16 years ago

Anything less than a PR6 isn't really spectacular.

dpritchett• 16 years ago

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

thenduks• 16 years ago

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.

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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

_delirium• 16 years ago

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!

sosuke• 16 years ago

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

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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.

sabat• 16 years ago

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.

ericd3• 16 years ago

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)

bkbleikamp• 16 years ago

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

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

thinkbohemian16• 16 years ago

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!

dasil003• 16 years ago

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.

ez77• 16 years ago

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

trafficlight• 16 years ago

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

http://toolbar.google.com/

271828183• 16 years ago

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

ApolloRising2• 16 years ago

Easier way http://www.prchecker.info

daeken• 16 years ago

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.

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

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