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Thanks
[edited by: ciml at 6:29 pm (utc) on Jan. 13, 2004]
Sorry if it's an odd question but I'm just trying to get my head around how a blog would work as a main site ... the only way I can think of it working is for a content site but I know (from trying to maintain my own content site) that there are frequently moments where I need to do something that I probably wouldn't find easy to do in a rigid CMS such as a blog.
I'm assuming that the page templates the blog s/w uses lend themselves to optimising rather than being the typical bloated pages that just happen to look good.
The only other generic thing I can think of is did you redirect traffic from the old pages to the new blog-format pages or just leave the old pages as 404s?
Anyway, without getting a little more background on what you were trying to do with this idea it's hard to say if/why it may have caused problems - it could just be the nature of pagerank and algos that's seen your site drop.
- Tony
+++ more outgoing links
PR goes leak leak leak....
not enough PR left in your site ---(
site is gone from SERPs!
seems logical to me, Basic PR 101
Unless you now have more people linking to your site? (injecting more PR)
It also comes up as #1 for my full name, which is also the name of the guy who invented a bunch of stuff, and is semi-famous as an American pioneer. I tend to get a lot of Google traffic based around things I posted about, and particularly from search queries which match things in the post titles.
So, depending on what game you're in, weblogs can be a great idea, but you have to do it properly.
(Oh, and consider wikis too, they are also pretty good for SEO purposes in some situations.)
Basically Moveable Type had a natural effect of doing everthing right for SEO: relevant titles, relevant links, good structure to help out the spiders, etc. It's not the fact that it's a blog but just the application of good SEO principles.
So how come DMOZ still has PR9 with 4 million outgoing links?
Valid point :)
perhaps its the 500,000+ links coming in?
my comment was just food for thought, obviously without examining chessmaniac's site in detail, nothing but hypthesis.
ciao
The only thing Movable Type doesn't do, for me, is allow me to specify file names for the posts, rather than just giving them numbers.
Actually, Movable Type does allow this. Thomas Korte explains how to set it up:
just add this line in Blog Config >> Configuration >> Individual Archives:
<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html
It will replace the default number URL with the name of your entry and '_' for spaces
I will answer a few of your questions. First, I just used a standard blogger.com template. I added archives to it and my site index. I choose a blog because of what I have been reading about them. I have read how great they are and how they can increase page rank because they add content. I mainly use it to link to news sites with stories about chess. I use google’s blogger feature on the tool bar to highlight some of the text and blog it to my site. I include a link to the news article so my users can read about chess. My site is a free chess-playing site and I get a lot of repeat visitors. So I thought it would be cool if I could take all of the news about chess and place little blurbs about each article with a link to the site. Maybe this is why my page rank nose-dived and disappeared.
Regarding movable type I don’t even know what this is. (I use the title of my entries as a permalink). What is permalink?
The only other generic thing I can think of is did you redirect traffic from the old pages to the new blog-format pages or just leave the old pages as 404s?
I replaced my index page with the new blog so that links were not affected. Basically I just added whatever information I had on the original pages onto the new blogs and overwrote the old files. I still have the other files however.
I don’t know if this answers enough of your questions. For your information I did contact google and asked them why my site had been dropped from the index. They were very nice and said they would send my email to the engineers. After a few days I did search on chessmaniac and it showed up again. However, my page rank has not recovered.
Thanks for your input,
Dennis
ChessManiac
Moveable Type is like Blogger - its software that allows you to publish a blog. You have to install it to your server or you can try their "typepad" service.
One thing it did differently than blogger (I haven't looked at blogger in a while) is that it makes a page for each entry. If you want to link to that page, it's called a permalink because it's permanent (as opposed to a link to your index page, which will only be relevant until you update something).
For example: If your made a blog entry today about "chess strategy A" and I wanted to link to it, I should link to your permanent page "chess strategy A" so that my visitors will get to the right place. Even though today I just go to your main page, in a couple months that might be about "chess strategy X".
I am basically using it to blog news about chess from other sites. So I have a lot of out going links. Are you saying that I might want to create content on my site that I would blog on my index page with a link to a page on my site? Wow! this is maybe why I am losing page rank. I have a bunch of news blog post that take you to other sites.
Am I on the right track?
Chessmaniac
If you don't put out, don't expect to receive ;)
Other styles of web site tend to be more reticent about providing links.
But if you truly have good content, you'll get incoming links wether you have a blog or not.
how is blogging any different (or more effective) than daily adding a page of new/good content to a site?
In most cases it makes no difference - however, blog software used as a CMS system lets new pages to be added very easily and integrated into the site's linkage without editing other pages. That's handy if you are in a hurry or if you have non-techies who can add content.
If you are involved in the blog link-exchange thing, that might help in the short run, although I'm not bullish on that kind of linkage.
Personally I feel there are other advantages to "blogging" as well. Fresh Content, niche directories, pinging sites when you update a page to show on the home page of Blogger.com, RSS feeds, features such as track back...
Now back on topic. Your page rank of your home page could have changed for numerous reason...but it is most likely due to less incoming links.
My thought is this, you said you changed your whole site over to a blog? If you changed your internal file/page structure it will take a whole "crawling cycle" to re-index and to recount the links back to your home page...this would be enough to account for the change.
My guess is still that one of your incoming links changed and that is where you saw the influence.
The most important thing to keep in mind is not your page rank, but it is your traffic and ranking, have you seen a major change in either?
One of my servers has fantastico, which makes installation of certain programs easy. For blogs, it has:
b2
b2evolution
Nucleus
pMachine Free
WordPress
Does anyone have enough experience with these blog programs to make a recommendation. Mainly, which would be best as far as natural search engine optimization?
Panic, it just makes it easier to update, you can "blog" from any computer in the world, as long as it has Internet access. With Standard publishing of a page you would need notepad, or your WYSIWYG editor, an ftp program...
You don't necessarily need any kind of program to add content to your site. If you setup some kind of content management system, it's easy to add content.
Other than that, if outgoing links are just passed around like nothing, doesn't that essentially make the links worthless?
If you setup some kind of content management system, it's easy to add content.
Exactly. Blogs can be set up for CMS purposes, and with powerful software like MovableType, the line between CMS and blogs tends to blur.
Historically, blogs had a big linkage impact on Google. I foresee continued efforts by Google to keep blogs in their place and not give their linkage patterns too much credit. I'd recommend removing software footprints as much as possible if you install blog software; but then, I recommend the same thing for any software that creates web content.
efforts by Google to keep blogs in their place
I've been looking at a recent situation where a friend with a technically oriented blog got a link from a prominent PR8 blog home page. Google never showed the backlink. Even now with the thread archived on a PR 5 page, Google is not showing the backlink. Makes you go hmm....
chessmaniac
Being an MT fan I converted my mostly-ignored personal site to a blog, mostly of religious issues. I'm getting a lot of interesting search engine traffic from searches I would never even think of. Google likes the site: four days ago I made a post whose title included two small religious movements and if you type their names into Google now my post comes up number 1. This is very nice from a SEO viewpoint, but also nice from the content side: since the posts allow comments I can now encourage a conversation between the two movements.
One warning though: by default Movabletype lists each blog entry as a number. When I switched servers recently, something must have happened, because all of the numbers changed. For a month or so Google was sending everyone to the wrong pages. Even worse, I had cross-linked my own site and all these links were broken! Yuck. I got complaints, let me assure you. I've now given my major posts static names made up of my keywords--I make up a PHP file that is simply an include for the numbered MT post. If the numbers ever go wrong again, I just have to replace the numbers of those PHP files.
I've tried the following and would recommend them in this order:
1: movabletype
2: wordpress
3: drupal
4: nucleus
All 4 apps are of high quality and they have stable developer/community support.
movabletype is the most user friendly and is written in PERL. The other 3 are PHP. Generally they're all capable of creating static link structures that search engines like. I prefer movabletype mainly because of its ease of use. Their administrative front-end is self-explanatory. This is the only blog out of the 4 that creates static pages on the server. If you're going to go this route I recommend you implement some type of dynamic/php template system with header/footer/sidebar includes, which won't require you to "rebuild" the individual article pages if you have changing sidebar information such as "categories" or "most recent entries." For instance, my site has 8 categories on the sidebar. If I create a new category and add an article to it, I have to rebuild all my individual archive/article pages so that the new category link will be displayed on those pages. I should practice what I preach and implement sidebar includes, but I'm too lazy.
I found wordpress to be easy to use as well, but not as well laid out as movable type. This is an outstanding app considering it's less than a year old. It's the successor to the b2 blogging tool. I was quite impressed with how it has covered the most important blogging bases, but it just isn't "there" yet for me.
Even though I'm in a position where I have to purchase a commercial movabletype license, I'm going to continue keeping my eye on wordpress in order to eventually dump movabletype.
nucleus is a clean, straight blogging tool like movabletype or wordpress. I found it's interface to be respectable but not as well laid out as the prior two.
drupal is the most complex of all 4 blogging tools, but it's more a community based CMS than blogging tool. What I mean is that it has user registration, forum & poll support, etc. Drupal is probably too complicated for most users. There's quite a learning curve when using Drupal that's not easily avoided. At this point, drupal is the only blog that supports infinite, nested categories. The next movabletype version is likely to support this, as well as the other blogs.
If you're going to use anything other than movabletype you'll have to understand a bit of the PHP language, because the other blogs aren't equipped with a propriety tag/language format as movabletype is.
And, of course, it's terrific for blogging :)
By the way, if you set up MT 'for a client' or use it for non personal use, you have to pay $150 for a commercial licence. I don't think the other options in the list above are under similar restrictions, as I believe they're GPLed.
I've asked this question before, and I've never gotten a straight answer, but from an SEM perspective, how is blogging any different (or more effective) than daily adding a page of new/good content to a site?
Easier. You can add content to your site from any web browser.
I know I say this a lot, but, it bears repeating: a blog is nothing more than a streamlined way to put content on a website, not a type of website or a definition of its content.
I have one site where I use a blog setup so any time I have a comment about something or find a funny or interesting article I want to put on my site, I just have to hit the "Blog This" button on the Google Toolbar and it's added to my site. Another (possible) benefit to using a blog is that you get listed in blog indexes. For example, every time I update my site using the blog setup, the update shows up on blogdex.
Is the main advantage of blogs merely that they offer a simple, quick and easy way to add content?
Yes. It lets people have web pages, post images, post audio (see my profile), etc. extremely easily (e.g., you don't have to learn a lick of HTML or even know what an FTP server is much less how to use one). The other bonus is that you don't have to have a web host to be able to put stuff online.
