Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Update: I’ve added a question mark to this post because it appears perhaps the PageRank update is NOT in progress. I thought I saw enough signs – a few of my sites have changed, John Chow’s changed too and a couple of blogs were talking about – but perhaps these are just random events and not indicating a full update is in progress. Apologies if I got your hopes up!

It never ceases to amaze me how much attention the budding webmaster and blogger gives to PageRank (if you are new to PageRank, read this explanation – PageRank Explained – Keeping SEO Simple).

In the last month or so I’ve seen some speculation that PageRank is no longer being updated and Google was abandoning it – or at least no longer updating the public display of PageRank on web pages. Given their now famous stance against text link buying to improve search results, it made sense that PageRank could be changed or simply left static, never to update again.

Word on the street is that the latest PageRank update is now occurring, so here we are again, all eagerly awaiting to see what happens to our sites. The speculation of PageRank’s demise will have to wait for another few months or until Google actually says something about it.

In recent times with the advent of services to make money from blogs like Text Link Ads and when selling advertising directly to sponsors, a site’s PageRank plays an important part (along with AlexaRank).

PageRank and AlexaRank are known for being terrible tools to accurately assess a website’s popularity, yet many third party advertising brokering services that bloggers and site owners depend on for a big chunk of their livelihood, rely on these tools for assessing how much money to charge for advertising.

Nothing I do is directly related to increasing my PageRank, but like most Webmasters, I love to see mine increase. I realize that simply because of the act of blogging and marketing a website, you naturally do good things for your PageRank, but the focus is not on whether the little green bar increases or not. You don’t judge your performance on PageRank, it’s just an added benefit.

Like many webmasters, I always look at the PageRank of sites and it definitely impacts my opinion of them. I don’t think it’s an accurate measure, but it gets attention, and in today’s ad driven world wide web – that matters.

So what PageRank score are you expecting after this update?

Adnan from Blogtrepreneur has written a field report entry in the forums regarding his experiment with the Alexa Widget on his blog in response to my previous article – How To Boost Your Alexa Ranking In One Easy Step.

Adnan reports:

I think it’s pretty obvious in saying that for me, the Alexa widget had a massive effect on my rankings. A result of this may have been the selling of 3 text links through TLA but I can’t know this for sure.

Read the full report

Back in earlier December I wrote two pieces regarding Alexa traffic rankings -

• How Does AlexaRank Work And Should You Pay It Any Attention?
• How To Boost Your Alexa Ranking In One Easy Step

Many readers followed the advice I offered in the second article and placed the Alexa widget on their blog in an effort to test whether my theory works (see the second article above for details).

After reading through the many comments I received from other bloggers I’ve come to another conclusion, or at least a clarification of my previous claims (or disclaimer even!) -

Some people reported back that the Alexa widget did nothing or even decreased their AlexaRank. This group was in the minority. Most people reported some increase after placing the widget, but by no means would I consider the people who chose to comment on my articles a sample size large enough to prove even remotely conclusive.

Dave Davis from RedFly Studios placed the widget on a site receiving more than 20,000 unique visitors per day, which based on my experience should at least have an AlexaRank in the top 10,000, probably the top 1,000. Dave’s site sat around the 100,000 AlexaRank mark and didn’t improve after adding the widget.

Of the people who reported positive changes, none experienced as significant a change as I did. Most people reported small 5-10% gains. All three of my blogs jumped at least 25% a week or two after installing the widget. Was I just lucky? Is there something unique about my blogs? I can’t really say.

AlexaRank By Category?

Jon from Art of Money wrote a comment regarding the comparison of categories when calculating AlexaRank.

The other thing to keep in mind about Alexa rankings is the they are heavily skewed towards sites that are of interest to Internet savvy – since, like others mentioned, it only counts visits from people using the toolbar, which is more likely to be us stats addicted Internet workers.

So it is really only a valid comparison between two sites in “like” categories. A site about dogs, for example would have to have 100 times as much traffic as Yaro’s BlogTrafficSchool to get a number in the 40k range, since there are 100 times more of Yaro’s visitors using the Alexa toolbar (or now the Search Status plugin).

I had not consider this before, but it could be a way of explaining certain ranking anomalies, however Jon’s comments triggered a thought about another possible explanation using categories.

If sites were ranked compared to other sites in the same category, or against the total volume of traffic in a given category, this may help to explain different Alexa rankings compared to real server traffic, like the case with Dave’s site. I have no idea how this would be calculated or tested though.

Whatever the case, I find it disconcerting that something like AlexaRank could impact a site’s propensity to generate income, if the consistency of rankings appears to be quite unreliable.

If you read Rich Schefren’s latest free e-book – The Final Chapter (aff) – you will have come across a link he provided to a great tool called Search Status for the Firefox browser.

You can download Search Status here

It’s a neat little Firefox extension that provides you with some handy shortcuts for things like PageRank, AlexaRank, backlinks, keyword density, link reports, whois and a bunch of other search engine marketing related tools.

Rich mentions this tool in his section of the Final Chapter as a resource for conducting competitive intelligence. You can use it to find which sites are linking to competitor sites so you can find out their likely JV partners, affiliates and traffic sources, which is valuable information. Rich had discussed some great points in the e-book about performing research on your competitors and I have to admit he takes it to a new level, I never thought to do some of things he suggests.

Personally I very often use backlink checks and the various tools provided by Search Status when I am evaluating a site I am thinking of buying or monitoring my own sites. Having all the tools available from my browser window makes these jobs just that little bit more efficient.

If you are obsessed with backlinks, PageRank, AlexaRank, and all the other search engine metrics, this tool is a must. Thanks to Rich for bringing it to me attention.