Looking Beyond Your PageRank

Last Wednesday — April 1, 2009 to be precise — Google was up to their usual tricks for April Fool’s Day. I didn’t pay much attention to their annual spoof, rather I soon found myself occupied with reviewing their PageRank export to the Google toolbar.

Yes, it appears that Google is hitting its stride with the all-important, but not that important Google PageRank update, by making changes on a quarterly basis. I say important because for some people it is the chief way that they measure their site’s worth, but I also say not important because there are many different factors and tools which tell how well a site is performing.

My PageRank Report Card

For the record, Matt’s Musings went from PR2 to PR3, WordJourney from PR3 to PR2, AutoTrends held steady at PR3 while The Article Writer is back up to PR4. FYI, The Article Writer made its debut at PR6 in June 2005 before gradually falling to PR5 before dropping to PR3.

Several tiny, niche sites (and even placeholder pages) I manage acquired their first ranking, PR1 to be exact, while my client’s two blogs at SayEducate.com and SayCampusLife.com managed to hold onto their previous PR4 position.

Other Ways To Measure Success

Granted, any drop in PageRank can be frustrating especially if you’ve been link building and using other methods to promote your site. However, there are other ways to measure the value of your website including:

Alexa Rank — Once widely panned by the SEO community, Alexa has gained some respect if only for their frequent updates which occur several times each month. The lower your Alexa number the higher your score.  However, it can easily be gamed through sites like Entrecard which encourage others to visit your site to inflate traffic numbers.

Google Analytics — If you run Google Analytics, you can gain an excellent understanding of your site’s traffic trends. While you won’t get a “rank” for how well your site performs, you will be able to gauge traffic numbers including page views, sources, and how well your AdWords campaigns perform.

Compete — Like Google Analytics, you can receive site traffic history and measure how your site compares against your chief competitors with Compete. Even in the basic (free) format, you can obtain some decent information about your site as well as your competition.

Semrush — Forget PageRank as I want to see how my sites perform with specific keywords. Recently, I discovered that the sharply increasing traffic to my The Auto Writer blog was bringing a lot of good attention my way. Turns out that I secured the #1 keyword phrase for a new vehicle about to be introduced, sending 200+ extra visitors to my site each day. Semrush has a freebie tool which can help you identify some of the results for free. Pay a monthly fee and you can get a hold of all of that information.

SERPs — You can check any search engine’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) manually to see how your site is doing. Honestly, I only check Google these days because of their dominance in the world of search. However, I also use Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools to analyze all of my data.

Miscellany — Of course, I use Twitter to help build contacts online and have been particularly taken by Twitter Search which is an excellent way to find out who has been talking about your favorite topic recently.  I also like to use a good backlink checker to find out who is linking to me, I let Google notify me when certain keywords or phrases I’m following get mentioned. Additionally, I like to peak at domain tools when I want to obtain information about a client, a competitor or when I’m considering purchasing a domain or website.

So, as you can see PageRank doesn’t carry quite the weight that it some think that it should, given the many different measurements to quantify your site’s success. True, I would love to have a higher ranking from Google across my network of sites, but it is the other factors that weigh heavily and seem to bring fresh business my way.

Something Here Seems Different….

…Maybe Even Out Of Place.

Relax, I've made some changes here. Least of which is the "new" theme, but I also pulled in more than 630 articles from my defunct The Article Writer blog.

Regular visitors to Matt’s Musings have probably realized that something here has been changed. The obvious difference is the “new” theme which I installed on Friday, but I also did quite a bit of work behind the scenes as well as off site work which involved pulling in almost all of the articles from my closed down blog, The Article Writer.

I haven’t done the 301 Redirect yet (it works, I’ve tested it) but this blog now contains most of those articles minus a handful of the old categories. Photographs are still linked to the www.thearticlewriter.com images folder, but I plan on uploading those pictures here and redirecting the links accordingly.

A number of people were surprised last May when I suddenly closed down what was then my flagship blog. I simply decided that I needed to redirect my attention elsewhere, particularly to a number of client projects. I’ve always maintained multiple sites of my own, but since the beginning of this year I’ve been thinking of consolidating my work in a bid to be much more effective with what I have.

At present, I manage six blogs but I’m likely to scale back to five when all is said and done. Eventually, my The Article Writer site will not have one blog associated with it as I give The Auto Writer its own site (I own the www.theautowriter.com domain) or merge it with Auto Trends. Yes, I think concentrating on one car blog is much more efficient; besides it takes the burden off of having to regularly update two similar sites which are basically in competition with each other.

For a lot of businesses – big and small – 2009 will be the year of consolidation and pulling back. I think that this makes sense as everyone is trying to figure out ways to cut costs and run more efficiently.

Those of you who work as freelance writers have always been doing that – picking which gigs fit best with what you do while passing over everything else. Like a steady rhythm, you’ve found your beat and are continually looking for ways to work smarter and faster while bringing in the pay.

I should complete the transition from the old blog to Matt’s Musings by the end of this month as I finish notifying my link exchange partners of these changes. A number of my online friends have kept their links in place to The Article Writer just as I have for them. Now, I want to give these same folks the opportunity to find me here, actively updating this site on a fairly regular basis.

I am planning on covering freelance writing topics on Matt’s Musings as I had been doing on The Article Writer, but not as consistently as I did previously. This blog has a much broader reach to it, one where I cover issues as far ranging as politics, small business development, SEO, societal trends, human interest, even the occasional public service article. Truly a mixed bag and hopefully something that you’ll find of interest as well.