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.

Assorted Stuff & Nonsensical Twitterish

I was considering posting a heavy duty expose on this and that for today, but decided against it. I’m up against a hard magazine article deadline and am pouring my energy into making sure that what I deliver is polished to perfection. Or at least is something I’ll be proud of!

Making Good Use Of Twitter

In any event, I’ve been making good use of Twitter over the past few weeks, by following people who are relevant to what I write about (cars, mostly) while twittering away to the tune of ten to twenty tweets each day. That is, if I have something beneficial to share.

Funny how you can dismiss something simply because you don’t understand it all that much. A few years back, in June 2007 to be precise, I mentioned how I found people online and where they could find me online.

Not An Early Adopter By Any Stretch Of The Imagination

I casually mentioned, “…but I think I’ll sit Twitter out” when I described my approach to social networking. Admittedly, I’m a more recent convert to Twitterdom, having come around to understanding how useful it can be. Sure, you can go crazy with it, but I’ve been able to get quite a bit out of many of the 140 or fewer character tweets that I have been reading.

Yesterday, I connected with a one-time client, Vinny, who is a Cadillac enthusiast who happens to also live in New York City. Though I’m not able to attend the New York International Auto Show in April, he will be there and plans to take plenty of pictures of various Cadillac models and concepts.

I mentioned that if he was to send a photo my way, I would post it on one of my sites, giving him full attribution. As you can see, this is a good win-win opportunity for us both.

Helpful List Of Do-Follow Sites

I also snagged a link from Andy Beard who shared information about a report created by Alex Goad which lists scads of do-follow sites where you can leave one-way links.  Sure, it could become a webmaster’s worst nightmare if spammers game the list, but a lot of the sites are familiar to everyone and likely to be on guard for such mischief. A terrific find!

Little did I know that Twitter is also a very good search engine too.  Sure, it isn’t as thorough as Google, but if you are looking for concise and highly relevant information, there is a lot of useful stuff that turns up.

Just don’t expect to see ads on Twitter…at least yet. How they make money off of this concept is a mystery to me, but its value as an internet destination is something I’m sure some of the web giants would love to absorb.