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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…

 
 

 

SEO Self Experiment – Week 2

Search results are decreasing – quite fast actually. I keep adding web catalog entries, posting links on digg, delicious and stumble upon, but this does not have any important effect – at least not bigger then the negative effects from sorting out duplicates. That seems to be what the search engines are doing: some very efficient catalogs proved to have their efficiency only over a very short period (less than one week).
The good thing is: the number of real results (that are displayed and not filtered away) keeps increasing. And link popularity keeps rising. The strange thing is, that the link popularity reports do not show one single catalog entry, also many other links are missing – they display only results of an old blog of mine that I created more than two months ago.

The keyword results show a lot of movement: with the top two keywords, I’m still not among the top ten result pages, links to my domain now dropped from page 1 to page 4. The top three keywords deliver results between page 1 and 2 (detailed reports will follow next week).

The top search terms identified via Google analytics for my domain show, that people are obviously willing to click through a lot of pages. If i repeat the searches, I often don’t get any results at all from my domain among the top ten or twelve result pages. Maybe that also shows that there is strong movement among keyword results: Today’s search does not deliver the same results as yesterday’s search.

Search engine’s share in the referring sites is also decreasing (while visitors keep growing) – some people do obviously really click on the catalog entries. Decrease is quite slow; I will have to monitor it for another few days.

The age of the indexed pages does also vary a lot, not really depending from their publication date: some old, not yet beautifully indexed urls are still indexed, some result pages also display old page titles (changed three weeks ago).

Submitting xml-sitemaps will be one of the next steps, but only after a few weeks of further observation.

 

 

SEO Selfexperiment Week 1

SEO Selfexperiment

SEO Selfexperiment, Week 1

A promised, some results.

It takes ages until contentmodifications of existing pages get displayed in search results. Some changes in pagetitles and metatags I made February 2 are still not visible (Feb. 16).

Results grow, but vary. Sometimes they grow exponentially to what I’m doing, sometimes slower, sometimes faster.
The same applies to the order of results: They change without any apparent changes on the pages themselves – the same results appear every day, but there ranking is different.

Search engines are very different in what they see: The number of results found reaches from 16 on live.com to 30.000 on yahoo.com (on the same day, with the same query).

Linksearch and Linkpopularity also grow with some delay. It took a few days, until Google found any links at all. The links that arelisted now in the search results are very old – I created them in the beginning of January. All other links are obviously not yet counted.

It’s too early to talk about success and the most important web catalogs yet – I’ll have to collect some more data. Here are just some charts on the basic development of results and links. The only thing I can say is Google may be ungenerous with links and results, but it’s of course the most prominent referrer.

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SEO self-experiment

I started an SEO self-experiment these days: How long does it take to promote a domain (without playing foul or spending money)? How long does it take search engines to react on changes (display new page titles, new meta tags)? How many new links do you get by entering web-catalogues, online-pr-distributors? How many links do you get by using social bookmarking?

The test arrangement

• registered an unusual domain (there are no other search results for this word then my own pages)
• set up around 100 pages with meaningful content
• followed the basic SEO-laws (use page titles, descriptions, keywords in decent length, use many internal links in the body text, name pictures etc.)
• creating three new web-catalog entries per day (I guess I’ll do this for about 3 weeks; it’s all manual work with individual descriptions)
• posting one article everyday on three social bookmarking services (delicious, digg, stumble upon)

What I’m checking daily is

• Number of search results for my domain name
• Number of links to my domain that search engines find

Softer facts I’m interested in are:

• which catalogues are the most efficient?
• which bookmarking services are the most efficient?
• when does it start to grow from alone, when do other users start to post links or bookmark stuff?

I’ll keep posting results on a weekly basis.

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