It has now been just over a month since Google assigned my blog with the PageRank 4. There is a lot of discussion about what exactly PageRank is and how exactly it affects blog rankings in search engine results. I have now collected some analytics data and will try to show how the increase in Google PageRank affected my blog traffic and search engine rankings.
New blog = Google PageRank 0
From 25th October, when I started my blog, until 31st December, when Google assigned me with PR4, I only got 121 visitors from search engines. That was 1.22% of my total blog traffic in that period and majority of this traffic was on searches for either my blog name or my domain name.
From PR0 to Google PageRank 4
On 31st December Google had a PR update and assigned me with page rank 4. From 31st December until January 8th nothing much had changed. I still got sporadic search engine traffic only.
But on January 8th I suddenly got 30 visitors from Google in one day. Since then the search engine traffic has been steadily growing. In 3 weeks since January 8th search engines have sent me 1420 additional visitors. More than 96% of these were from Google and traffic referred by search engines had a 10.86% share of my total traffic in January.
My top 10 keyword phrases
Majority of traffic I get at the moment contains keywords and keyword phrases very close to my domain name. 6 of my top 10 keywords are closely related to my blog domain name and blog title:
- how to make a blog
- how to make my blog
- make a blog
- blogging ideas
- make my blog
- howtomakemyblog
This shows me that it is very important to chose a domain name which contains relevant keywords or relevant keyword phrase to your topic. It will help you rank higher as Google places huge significance on the domain name and keywords in it.
The long tail of blog search traffic
In January Google sent me 1490 visitors via 1019 different searches and keyword phrases. The best working keyword phrase brought only 100 visitors so this definitely shows the power of the long tail keywords. Here are some examples of keyword phrases that brought me visitors from Google during January:
- how to grow your twitter followers
- how to increase page rank of my blog
- go viral on twitter
- how do i get ideas for my blog
- insert ads between wordpress blog post
- step by step how to build a blog on wordpress
- getting traffic via stumbleupon
- how to add a subscribe to in my wordpress blog
- how to approach potential advertisers for my blog
I may not be able to rank top for the highly-popular but highly-competitive keywords, but if I have a lot of articles with a wide range of relevant keywords, and get a couple of daily clicks for each, I will have a healthy amount of search engine traffic daily. The long tail in action!
How to optimize the PageRank effect
If you have PR0 you cannot do much other than build unique content and attract high-quality and relevant links with good anchor text. Writing guest posts on other blogs is my recommended way of doing this. Keep working on it consistently and Google will notice you.
If Google has already assigned your blog with a PageRank it may not automatically help you rank higher but there are several things you can do to optimize the effect of an increased pagerank on your rankings for the different keywords:
- Follow the rules to keyword optimize your blog posts
- Do proper keyword research when writing blog posts. Having a PR4 means that I can compete for lots of different keywords so by including wide range of keyword phrases in my content I stand a fairly good chance of ranking high for long tail keywords
- Optimize PR juice. Now that my main page has PR4 I can use that page rank authority and transfer it to some of my articles by optimizing the link juice flow on my blog
- Interlink the blog content with a good internal linking structure to make the content that you want to be ranked for easily found by search engines
Conclusion
I hope this article shows you that it is possible to get traffic from Google and search engines, even if you have a young blog and even if you are in a very competitive niche. Focus on getting quality links to your blog and focus on writing quality content, and you will soon experience an increase in pagerank and search engine traffic.
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{ 27 comments }
Very cool! Thanks for the stats – they help put some logic behind it all.
Thanks for the useful article! Gonna do more research on this.
Marko,
Although in this example your pagerank and improved search ranking seem to go correlate. However in my experience I have seen search ranking increase while page ranks actually goes down so it doesn’t always go hand in hand. Another factor is Google will not rank your site well right away no matter how good the content ect it will usually take 90 to 180 days to start ranking well for a new site if everything is done correctly. In your case you happen to have quality content plus good inbound links and pagerank so you have all these factors working together in your favor so your improved search ranking doesn’t suprise me.
Wow it looks like your search engine traffic is really going up. I’m sure PR has some to do with it, but I think the main thing is just being knowledgeable about your keywords, titles, meta tags… and that all comes with experience. I’m getting about 100 hits a day now from a single search term, simply because I did a little research before I wrote my post. I tried writing a post based on a keyword, still giving good information, and it’s paid off tenfold. So PR certainly helps, but a little SEO knowledge can work if you don’t have good PR.
Marko,
my experience with PR and search engine traffic is the following: In 4 months i got my blog to PR3 with some of the pages having PR 4 – 5 and even PR6!
Search engine traffic was constantly increasing until the week Google gave me the PR rankings. Since then it dropped by 20 %. It is clear to me that the PR does not influence SERPs, but it is good because it is a quality indication for the blog.
Thanks
How do you find out your page rank?
It is good to hear that people have different experiences with Google, serach engine traffic and PageRank… thanks for all the comments!
@Reality Raver – If you search for PageRank checker or something similar in Google you will get several places. Check this one for example: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
Hello Metmarko
I finally checked my stumble friend invites! I went through them and had a few spam ones others not. Yours when I checked it initially made me go arrr is this another google pr site but on further inspection I see more to it then meets the eye.
Beside my site I do have a blog http://usefulcomputerhelp.blogspot.com/ though I’m not as active with it lately.
I also started a blog in October and received my first Google Page Rank at the end of December, PR3. It has been exciting to see search traffic grow week to week. It is a small technical niche, beginning Groovy and Grails programming, so I’m never expecting huge traffic but I do enjoy it when a reader finds me through search.
Thanks for the Twitter help. I’m still stumbling somewhat there.
Thanks for this. I’ve been wondering about PR and how it is generated. If I understand correctly, Google will rank my site on its own, correct? Does a site get strong traffic and then get a strong PR or does a site get a high PR and then get traffic as a result? How can I find out what my PR is?
Sorry for the barrage of questions!
T
@T Edwards – PR is mostly about links. If you get good links to your site, Google will award you a good PR, which then (at least in my case) resulted in me starting being indexed for keywords and getting some traffic. Find your PR at: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
thanks, Marko. Maybe I shouldn’t be thanking you, I just found out my PR is only 1! I’m still young yet but I definitely have a lot of work to do.
Thanks again!
My blog is about 2 months old with a page rank of 0.
Still, my google search hits to my site have steadily been increasing. Who knows why.
It’s all voodoo to me.
Great post! Love the fact of trying to crack the google pr mystery.
My blog is currently a pr3 after be ing up for about 3 months and the traffic has surely been increasing. Maybe I’ll be a pr4 too soon.
Great post, sir.
Been watching this topic recently as I get google alerts on certain aspects of luggage. A company called village luggage last month was mentioned in several blogs over the course of a week in relation to sales on Tumi. Before hand if you did search on Tumi, village luggage was about 3-4 pages down in the search. During this mini-blogfest they jumped up to 4th, ahead of macys.com (and several other more popular sites for luggage sales); now they are down to 12th spot, second page.
So while I agree with search words playing a part, I believe linking has huge impact, even if temporary.
Gaming google is pretty old–are you familiar with search for “French military defeats” as a search term and hit “I feel lucky” to get first pick. Very funny, done back in 2001.
BTW, study a couple of years ago said most people don’t go more than 2 pages deep in a Google search. Figure that is still true today so this topic is EXTREMELY important.
@Steeler – Definitely links are monumental! Doesn’t have to be quantity, but couple of quality links with good anchor text and Google will notice.
Most people do not even scroll down past listing number 5 or so. For best results and most eyeballs you probably need to be in the top 2 results.
Hi Marko! I’ve been unclear on what exactly page rank is for so this helps explain it better. I’m glad to see you achieving more and more success!
Hi Marko !!
dear as per ur article I m in know hw situation, I started regular blogging also from Oct last year. Got very good search engine visitors. Around 41% of my visitors are from search engine and majority of them thru google. Get daily arnd 300 unique hits and arnd 2000 pageviews ( this data doesnt include Seearch Engine data). Got nearly 30 – 40 hits thru google search engine and nearly in total 50+ from various search engine. These data are from google analytics .
But then also my ranking is PR0
, dunt know why, even google index my all result in just 10 min. Whenever I post it appeared on google search engine.
Can u please tell me what is the reason behind this
,, I m very fraustrated with this PR issue. But happy that google giving me maximum exposer on his search engine.
My site is for meant for Indian Financial market and information provided hereto is meant only for Financial data and information for mass people.
@TI – If you get search engine traffic, I would not be too focused on your PR being still 0. Who cares about PR, if they still do send you traffic? If you get no search engine traffic, and also have a PR0 then some of the strategies mentioned in this article should help.
@washington – Good story. Definitely true. Having a keyword-rich domain name is the first step in getting traffic from search engines. Another step is making your permalinks pretty so they include your article titles in them.
I had my PR drop this time around. Well, the home page dropped but other pages went up. Even with the domain page dropping it’s rank I am getting more hits from Search results than before. PR seems to be more for advertisers to look at then actual placement in the serp’s.
I just keep plugging along in case I ever want to sell advertising then I need to get my PR back up on all pages.
@Sheryl Loch – Thanks for the comment. Definitely, the traffic search engines send you is the most important part. If you already get search engine traffic, I wouldn’t really put too much attention on PR etc. Just keep building content as the more content you have indexed, the increased chance you have of getting new visitors via long-tail keywords.
Great success story. Love hearing people make their way up in Google. It seems like I have read all the tips and cant get past PR1. Only time and lots of long hours will tell.
Good work
In my experience it seems like the succes comes like when you use a ketchup bottle, at fist nothing happens, and then it comes all at once.
I think it has a lot to do with Google’s indexing of the site and of the links pointing at the site – and how they translates into rankings.
I’m reading your posts to get an idea about what’s going on on my blog. Day by day I’m getting less Google search engine results. I’m not using any keywords. Earlier i got decent number of Google search traffic. Google has assigned page rank 1 on my blog and it didn’t change since the beginning. Wish some one help me on this one.
I have an excellent instance:
I have 3 blogs: 2 with PR3 and 1 with PR2. All 3 are fresh – 2 months.
The successful one (PR3) gets 1250 daily visitors mainly from Google!!!
The two other: one (PR3) gets 45 the other (PR2) 9.
My impression is that PR doesn't matter that much – no affection to SERPs at the short term.
However, unique and useful content – yes. Let’s see how PR will affect on the coming days.
Hi, thanks for the post. I was just wondering why I haven't been getting much traffic from Google and thought it may be due to not having a page rank yet (opened my blog about a month ago and page rank doesn't update til September) and this post has confirmed what I was thinking.
Does anyone know whether Bing will be operating the same principle as google? Ive looked at their search engine and I like it (especially how you can hover over text without actually going to the website) but my site is no-where currently on key words optimised for Google. It could be that they havent sorted all of this yet or it could mean that theyre operating a completely different method. ANyone know?
Great blog BTW
Louise