SEO Self Experiment, Week 3+4

Things are going down. Quite fast, actually. Web catalogs are slow with creating entries, bokmarking is not really a boost anymore once you have reached some basic values – and especially link popularity is quite far behind: 18 confirmed catalog entries, three blogs with over 50 entries each linking to the site – and google only recognizes 10 incoming links? These links contain only 2 catalogs, the rest are quite arbitrary posts from one of my blogs. Only eight from over fifty are counted; they are not the most recent ones, nore the most clicked, they are all from the same blog and they don’t differ from other posts at all – no idea why it’s them and not others (if it’s the pagerank of the linking page, that would mean that most catalogs are cheating about their rank. So let’s not assume that…).

Some conclusions for now:

• It does not grow by itself. You can keep search results growing by adding bookmarks, entries, links, but you can not fully control the growth. The quality of the links is to challenge: it’s usually the same domains that get ranked well.
• There does not seem to have been a page rank update since I’m running my stuff (some sites  say it will be on march 26), and the age (less then three months, which is mostly not registered by seo-analyzers) are further disadvantages.
• Creating bookmarks and catalog-entries is one way to stay visible; it requires a lot of work (or using some tools and spending money) and it creates some background noise.
• Efficieny is quite low – there are only a few directories that really make a change; it’s not that much effort to create an entry there.
• There is a strong hype at the beginning, but the number of search results shrinks down quickly.
• Referrer-analysis proves, that blogs, magazines, communities with high usage are the best traffic sources: you get qualified leads – and creating entries there is not such braindead work as creating web catalog entries
• Other search engines are more generous than Google (especially with link popularity) but for no good: alltogether they bring about ten percent of the traffic google brings.
• And finally: I’m also tracking the “real”, clickable search results from Google. At least they keep increasing (if you don’t care for some hype that obviously happened last week…

Next steps for me will be to create more comments and content oriented postings, and also to spread links in existing networks I built so far (which wil also be some endurance test for the network features).
I also submitted a simple sitemap (urls only) to see if that helps; especially because the results are generally quite old…

More updates next week…