Detective blog
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I think I’m on the right track, but traffic and google pagerank has been a bit slow in coming.
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Heads-up on Google PageRank:
They only update the toolbar about 4 times a year. The next time should be sometime this month. Your site will show PR 0 if it is new, until the next update.
PageRank is somewhat overrated however.
Interesting subject.
I think to get more traffic with a blog the key is to do the trackbacks. You have to comment on other peoples’ blogs and then link to them.
Joel,
My Google toolbar has been flip-flopping between PR-0 & PR-4 for the past couple months. My site went online in 2000.How do I do the trackbacks? Should I find other related blogs, maybe ones related to crime and post my comments on their blogs, with a link back to my blog? Should I also then put a link under my blogroll in my sidebar back to their blog? What if they are using rel=”no-follow” tags?
Fredmaybe this article will help…
http://blogforfunandprofit.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/12/15/206584.html
I’m wondering if I should be hosting my blog from my homepage or should /blog be just as good?
My beyourowndetective domain was banned from Google last summer, because I was using script-generated doorway pages, but Google lifted the ban months ago, after I cleaned up my site and sent them a reinclusion request.
1. With Trackbacks, the point is that you catch the interest of the other blogger and he or she then links to your blog in a new post on the subject. You’re right about comments and Trackbacks that show up as comments: nofollow will prevent there being any SE value. So you have to have something in your blog that will catch the interest of the other blogger enough to make them want to post about something you’ve written and also link to it. Something controversial without being needlessly provocative is usually best.
To implement the Trackback, when you write the post, paste the other blog’s URL in the Trackback field of the post screen. Also you can simply link to the other blog in one of your blog posts.
Yes, you do have to find other relevant blogs to do this. It doesn’t have to be a net detective; as long as they are writing about something you can also write about, it’s fine. Net privacy is a big topic a lot of different people, and bloggers generally, write about, so that might be one to try.
2. I’m not sure why the toolbar was going up and down on you; it might be that there is a PR update underway. Your PR is NOT going down from 4 to 0. But PR in and of itself is no big deal. In fact, if you insert your site’s URL in your profile as your website URL, you will likely get a PR 4 just from that. Since PR is so easy to come by, it’s not worth as much as it used to be in SEO terms. You need a certain baseline (say, 4), but since everyone has it, it’s really not that big of a deal. And you can find plenty of PR 4-5 pages ranking for competitive keywords, so once you get to around PR 5, you don’t have to worry much anymore about PR. Instead, you need relevant links and content.
As for should the blog be in its own directory or on the homepage, that depends on one thing: is there anything else of value on your site aside from the blog? If the blog is the only important thing on your site, by all means it should be on the homepage. Google and the other SEs give pride of place to the homepage, so it makes sense to have the lion’s share of your links going there, as well as the focal point of the site’s content. Don’t just have one of those sites, like Matt Cutts, where the homepage is just empty except for a link to the blog. It’s a waste of a homepage.
One more thing about PR: even if your site is X years old, any new page will still only show PR 0 until the next toolbar update.
I blogged about this thread here; it really got me thinking since it’s a bunch of issues that come up a lot.
The purpose of my site is to make money, primarily selling “Net Detective.” See my “Become a detective…” sign up forms at the bottom of my blog pages. I’m also doing “Ads by Google.” My blog is partly experimental. I signed up for Google Alert for keywords such as “criminal background checks” then write a synopsis of a really interesting story as a new post. I’m doing other things for ranking and traffic such as publishing articles. It’s just taking way too long to start seeing results.
When I write a new post to my blog as the admin, should I add anything to my “TrackBack a URI:” box, or leave it blank?
It’s impossible to tell whether I’m under some kind of Google penalty, maybe the sandbox, but it does appear I might be under a Yahoo penalty. Also notice my Google backlinks flip-flop back & forth between 27, and 0 links, like it’s in a state of flux. I might want to seriously look at my reciprocal links and start weeding out the bad ones.
Hi,
* The Google and Yahoo link: features no longer function, nor have they for quite a few years. They effectively disabled them because they were being abused by SEOs. Try MSN Search for that, but their function is still somewhat disabled.
* If I were you I would have ditched the domain after it was blacklisted, or at least given up on SEOing it. No one knows about long term penalties that might be applied after a site is de-listed and re-listed.
* For the trackback thing you should be looking for other blogs in Technorati to blog about.
* Note that all the above is to make it succeed as a blog and subsequently in terms of SEO. This should bring ripple benefits to your site down the line in terms of SEO (assuming you aren’t being penalized). And anyway, you need content to attract search engine traffic and a blog is a fairly easy way of building it.
Are you going after any keywords? Honestly, blogging probably won’t help you significantly with ranking well for keywords, since you never know how the other people are going to link to you.
Blogging is only one method I am experimenting with to bring in traffic and ranking. I’m also writing and publishing articles. My blog posts are based on my important keywords.
The link: function appears to work ok, except Google and Yahoo never seem to expounge old long-dead links from their cache. Google still has pages in their cache that I deleted over 6 months ago.
If I am under any penalty, some of my old reciprocal links could be suspect.
Joel,
I wrote a new post about something I read on another blog, would I want to put the link to that page in “Send trackbacks to:” under “Advanced: on my Write Post page?I tried that but when I saved and published my draft, I see the link to the other blog page is no longer in the “Send trackbacks to:” box where I entered it. It’s now listed further down the page as “Already pinged.”
I take it, the trackback link is not automatically re-pinged. I’m still confused about how the trackbacks work, and how they benefit my blog’s ranking and traffic.
Are you sure you’re a net detective? 😉
you need to find a trackback link under their article you are discussing. If there isnt a trackback URI on his article then it cant happen.
Take that trackback URI and stick it in your trackback box when you publish.
Then (maybe after moderation) generally a link to your site and a snippet from your article should show under his article on his site.
I see. So a trackback URL is a special link that’s only found on blogs. Since I mostly wrote about news stories, there’s no trackback link. I looked at the bottom of one of my post pages and noticed “You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.” It’s in very small print, so I never really noticed it before.
I guess I will have to quit writing from news stories I find via google alerts, and only related blogs instead. The work I put into my blog already might have been a waste of time.
Maybe it won’t hurt for me to keep what I have, since it at least helps build a foundation of content.
I’ve said this before in another one of your posts and I’ll say it here, I think the whole problem is that your not concerned about the content of your site!
If they’ve already punished you for using unethical methods to have your site rank higher, they certainly have a record of that somewhere and must keep that in mind when spidering your site.
Your site offers nothing that can’t be found on 1000’s of other sites that are peddling the same services. If you want Google to index you, you have to stop worrying about making them coming so much and give them a reason to, put up UNIQUE content related to the topic of your site.
If you keep trying to do whatever you can to force Google to rank your site, you’ll end up being blacklisted again or being reported as a spam blog. I would think if someone was looking for some quality information on your topic and kept ending up getting the same garbage they’d find at any other number of sites, not only could they report your site as being spam, but I don’t think they’d become a customer of yours either.
Your site won’t become highly ranked over night, it will take time and you must be patient, if you are not, you’ll en up being in the doghouse again and then you’ll be even further behind than you already think you are.
Cheers,
Michael.I thought I was doing a fairly decent job writing unique content in my blog, but maybe not. I guess it could use improvement. I’m still learning about blogging.
I think you’re right, I am being too impatient about getting results right away.
Thanks,
Fred
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