Category: General

I’m really surprised at the response I got to my last post on Google.  It’s a common problem, I know something and assume everyone else knows it too, then start saying something else based on that assumption.  It’s clear in the case of Google it may not be such a bad idea if I take a step back and say a couple of more things about how it works.

Honestly, if you aren’t interested in this, you don’t really need to understand it, because the blogging software we all use (WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, etc.) takes care of most of it without us having to think about it.  It’s only ‘power users’ of blogging software that need to think about it.

It’s also the case that Google itself doesn’t publish this information, it’s all based on observations other people make about the way Google works, it’s subject to individual interpretation and Google changes frequently anyway.  What’s true today may not be true in a few months time.  Please think of this more as my opinion than anything else, and if you’re really interested in the subject you should research it further.

I didn’t mention this in the last post, but when you look up your PR on the Internet, keep in mind that Google delays making your updated PR public for about a month.  Google slowly crawls through the Internet looking at everyone’s pages, and it typically takes about a month for Google to notice structual changes to your site, like updating blogroll links and such.  Since it then takes another month for Google to actually make your updated PR information public, you won’t know if changes you make helped for at least 2 months afterwards.  The best thing is not to pay too close attention to your PR, just do common sense things, and let things work out as they may.

This is another reason why linking to most PR0 pages is not a risk.  It’s because everyone starts at PR0, but very soon after starting a blog Google will assign it a real PR.  If you’re a serious looking blog this is probably PR3.  You just don’t know what it is for a couple of months.  If you see a serious looking but new blog on the Internet with a PR0, you shouldn’t be afraid to link to it.

The World According to Google

What Google sees on the Internet is a whole bunch of pages containing information, all linking to one another and not much else.  It looks at the information on these pages, and the way the links are constructed, and tries to make some assumptions about what’s important or not.

On the most basic level, if you have a page on the Internet you want Google to recognize as legitimate, it must have some basic components.  Otherwise Google will likely assign the page a very low PR and ignore it.

These components are:

• At least one incoming link
• At least one outgoing link, pointing outside your domain
• Some basic formatting, including a title and preferably a picture
• Some non-static information, updated at least every month or so

Beyond these things, Google also understands most Internet sites are a collection of pages containing mostly static information linked to from one main page.  You won’t be penalized for example by having static blog posts that scroll off the front page of your blog onto later pages.

Google tends to assign your front page with the highest PR, then pages after this with a lower rank.  In my case, my front page is a PR5 and most of my other pages seem to be a PR 2 or 3.

It’s important for you to think of your Internet site in this same way, so you can organize it in a way that helps Google understand it!

For example, it’s important to decide what your main page is and what your ‘other’ pages are.  If you have a blog with a blogroll, you probably want to make sure your blogroll is on the same page as where you receive your incoming links, or Google may not be able to see you as a site that has both incoming and outgoing links.  In some cases there are reasons for putting your outgoing links on another page, and I’ll get to that below.

If you don’t have these basic ideas in place, you have little hope of even being recognized as legitimate by Google.

Beyond being recognized by Google, there are a number of ways you can encourage it to give you higher PR and make it more likely people can find you when searching the Internet.  It’s been estimated that Google looks at hundreds of different things on your Internet site when making these decisions, some much more important than others, and I’m just going to mention a couple of them.

Placing you in a Category

Beyond recognizing you as legitimate, one of the first things Google tries to do is place you in a known category.  Google does this primarily by looking at your outgoing links, which is one of the reasons for making sure these are in an obvious place where Google can find them.  Google probably recognizes tens of thousands of categories and sub categories, and if it can’t figure out who or what you are, it will severely penalize your PR.

Make sure you give some thought to exactly who and what you are, and make sure this is reflected in your external links so Google can correctly place you.

Search Terms

Since people use Google to search for specific things, you can also give some thought if you want to try to score high for particular searches.

For example, a few years ago when I made this post on weed burners, I had this idea in mind.  By including the words ‘weed burner’ over and over again in the text and in the title, it let Google know this post was really about weed burners and anyone searching for them should be directed to this post.

Like doviende mentioned in the comments on the last post, most of us have concluded by now this isn’t a very useful thing to do.  It does still work however, if it’s what you want.

Incoming Links

Of course it’s important to have some incoming links, and as we all know this is one of the hardest things when starting a new blog.  Like I mentioned in my last post, PR is very important when determining the value Google places on links, with every PR increase of 1, it’s thought Google weights it by a factor of 10.  A PR increase of 2 can mean Google weights it by a value of 100!  While it’s very important to get a few links to start with, in the end a handful of high PR links are more important than lots of low value links.

Also, like I mentioned in my last post, a site with a high PR linking to one with a low PR will result in a significant loss in PR for themselves.  For this reason, if for example you have a PR2, it’s very unlikely you will receive any links from sites that have a PR5 or over.  Even if you don’t have any aspirations to score high in the Google search engine itself, it’s still important to pay attention to your PR or other sites won’t want to link to you.  It’s also important to all of us as a garden blogging community, that we collectively have as much PR as possible, in order to have general recognition on the Internet.

It’s not that I’m suggesting excluding anyone, but we should certainly be searching for problems and fixing them where we can, and generally helping each other out.

Outgoing Links

Getting a PR of up to 5 is possible without taking any special care of your outgoing links, but going beyond 5 is almost impossible with large numbers of outgoing links or links to low PR sites.  By the time you are PR 7 or 8, all of your outgoing links must be planned very carefully in order to maintain your PR.

Like I mentioned before Google looks at your outgoing links to put you in a category, and its particularly sensitive to a link to a low ranked site outside your category.  If it sees this, it assumes it’s a paid advertising link.  You should consider this when accepting payment for such links.

There are a few tricks that can be used to avoid losing PR with outgoing links.  The first Anthony mentioned in the comments on the last post.  You can code outgoing links with ‘nofollow’.  It’s too technical to explain the details here, but send me an email if you want to know more about this.  This coding tells Google it should ignore the link, and all common blogging software codes links given in comments this way, so you never have to worry about people leaving links in comments that may hurt your PR.

Another trick with blogrolls or collections of links, is to put them on a separate page, away from your main page.  In this way, because the PR of this page will be lower than your main page, the people receiving your link will benefit much less, but it also won’t cost you very much in terms of PR.  You should be careful of doing this when you are a new blog, because like I mentioned before Google needs to be able to find these links to put you in a category, and if you put them on a page that has a low PR Google may not be able to find them.  Once you’re established and Google knows who and what you are, it should be able to find these links on a separate page.

Many very high ranking sites are organized this way, for example online newspapers and magazines.  Their top page may be a PR8 or PR9, but then it will have a structure of pages with decreasing PR, and they will place outgoing links from their lower rank pages.

Useful Content

Doug Green mentioned on the comments of the last post that you shouldn’t forget about writing something useful!  This is of course the most important thing, because everything else follows after that.  If you write something useful, people link to you, they click on your search results as they appear in Google and so on, Google has ways of seeing this and you get on the good side of Google very quickly this way.  As long as you don’t have fundamental problems with the organization of your pages and links, nothing is more important than this.

Frequent Updates

As far as Google is concerned new content is much more interesting than older content.  By frequently updating your pages, you become ‘news’ rather than just information, and Google will take you much more seriously.  Posting several times a week is a great way to get Google’s attention.

Google Favorites

Google just prefers some types of Internet sites over others.  On Google’s search results page, near the top, is a ‘more’ drop down list.  This is a list of the major types of sites Google recognizes.

Google likes blogs!  It’s really a gift Google gives us by giving nearly all serious blogs a PR3 to start with.  In comments on the last post some people made it sound like a disappointment to ‘only’ have a PR3.  This is really high when considering the Internet as a whole, and nothing to be disappointed with!  If you are a PR3, Google is taking you very seriously.

If you are using some non-standard or custom made software for your blog, make sure you do everything possible so Google can recognize it as a blog.  A common definition of a blog is ‘A Journal with Dated Entries’.  Make sure you at least have something that looks like this!

Google is particularly fond of blogs organized like the Agricultural Biodiversity blog, without static links in a front page blogroll, but rather very frequent posting with external links.  To Google this is a site where the people behind it are working very hard to make sure the Internet knows what’s hot!  It takes both the blog itself, as well as the external links, very seriously.

Good Use of Tags

There are many subtle as well as obvious ways information can be tagged.  For example, making sure pages have appropriate titles is very important.  Using meta tags can help a lot, for example if you load the front page of this blog then select ‘View – Page Source’ in your browser, you will notice the following lines near the top:

<meta name="description" content="heirloom gardening, seed saving, food safety, food politics, seed exchange" />
<meta name="keywords" content="heirloom gardening, seed saving, food safety, food politics, seed exchange" />

These help Google understand what the site as a whole is about.  It can also help a lot to put tags on your posts, as well as choose good categories for them.  Giving pictures titles, can help Google index these.

Broad Base of Links

If you are a group of 10 blogs, who all link to each other, Google will see this.  It’s important to get out on the wider Internet, and share some links with others.  It’s okay if a few of your outgoing links fall outside whatever category Google has assigned you, as long as they don’t have low PR.

Post About Google

My last suggestion would be to post about Google.  Traffic over the last few days has really spiked here!  Google knows we are talking about them.  Someone in the last post commented Google is recommending this blog to users of their blog reader.

Comments Are Open

If you have other ideas about getting on the good side of Google, please let us all know!

I have this love/hate relationship with Google.

Probably most people reading this know that Google assigns every page on the Internet a Page Rank between 0-10.  You can check your Page Rank here.  Google uses this Page Rank, together with other factors, to determine how easy it is for people to find your Internet site in their search engine.  Just for the record, at the time of writing this post, the front page of this blog has a Page Rank of 5.

A Page Rank of 0 is a special case and means Google just doesn’t know about your site yet.  A rank of 1 or 2 means something is wrong with your blog or Internet site, either Google just doesn’t understand the information there or it believes you are only providing commercial or other information that’s not useful.  A rank of 3 or 4 is normal, and very respectable.  A rank of 5 or 6 means you are a very popular site.  A rank of 7 or 8 means you are in the top 1% or so of Internet sites, and these are mostly associated with online newspapers or magazines.  Only a very small handful of sites have a Page Rank of 9, and only Google itself has a 10.

It’s important to point out that if you have a blog, post from time to time and don’t have too many ads or links to low ranked sites, you almost certainly have a Page Rank of at least 3 or 4 and don’t have anything to worry about.

A Page Rank of 3 or 4 would honestly suit me just fine.  I sometimes find it annoying having a high Page Rank, because it often leads to people finding this blog for frivilous reasons.  A good example of this would be my Fava Bean (Broad Bean) post from some years ago, which continues to receive ongoing comments.  My most valued readers are regular ones, and I think most people find this blog via other blogs anyway, so I don’t really put a high value on scoring well in Google.

At the same time, I can’t afford to totally ignore Google.  I wouldn’t want to neglect my Google rankings to the point where I totally fell out of search results, but also for all of us that have blogs or other Internet pages, our Google Page Ranks have an impact on one another.  We share Google Page Rank by linking to each other, and mostly for that reason it makes sense for me to try to maintain as high a Google Page Rank as possible.

When someone links to me, I gain a little bit of Page Rank.  When I link to someone else, the same thing happens, they gain Page Rank.

However there’s not an infinite amount of Page Rank floating around the Internet, and when someone places a link on their Internet site or blog, they also lose a little bit of Page Rank themselves.  The amount of Page Rank they lose is proportional to the difference in Page Rank between the two sites.  For example, if I have a Page Rank of 5 and I link to someone else who has a Page Rank of 1, this is a very expensive link for me to place.  If the site I link to has a page rank of 5 or 6, I don’t really lose much, and if they in turn link back to me, in fact there is a net gain.

It’s important for this blog to be the least burden possible on other blogs who wish to link here.  Likewise, it’s important when I link to someone else this site receive maximum benefit from that link, as it would if I have a higher Page Rank myself to begin with.

Most of you have also noticed I have a personal link to a page where I rent out an apartment locally, and while I’m not expecting anyone here particularlly to click through and rent the apartment from this blog, the increase in Page Rank my apartment page receives as a result of being linked to from this blog is very substantial and important in helping me keep it rented.  It’s important this page continues to receive maximum benefit from this blog.

The Bottom Line

Probably most people reading this are wondering by now what I’m rambling about, but this is a round about way of explaining that I am about to go through all the external links on the front page of this blog and rationalize them in terms of how much Page Rank they are costing me to have.  In particular, I intend to remove all links to Internet sites with a Google Page Rank of 1 or 2, and I will consider sites with a Page Rank of 3 on a case by case basis.  Like I mentioned above, a Page Rank of 0 is a special case, and I will keep these links.

I’ve already taken some other steps over the last few months to improve my Page Rank, and this is the next logical thing to do.

This is a little painful for me, and a number of these sites have information I would like to maintain a link to.  However, a Page Rank of 1 or 2 means there’s something wrong with your site, and it should be fixed so you aren’t a burden to those who link to you.  If you want my help in fixing it, send me an email and I’ll see what I can do.  Once you improve your Page Rank, I can consider putting the link back to you.

A good quick way of improving your Page Rank is to get it included in the DMOZ, or just get other people to link to you.

As is always the case, I try to keep my Blogroll current.  If you have a blog, and haven’t written anything in the last month or two and I don’t expect to see much anytime soon, I’ll probably remove your link.  If I notice you’re posting again, I usually put the link back.

With what looks to be the most serious economic downturn for quite some time upon us, many of our thoughts are turning to what the fallout is going to be when everything settles.  Already the problem of stress is apparent.

It’s clear the problems with the world’s economy are different in different places, and in the very short term probably the most serious in the US followed closely by the UK.

Of course most of us have some financial ties to the US, so we are all in some way effected.  I’m really sobered however by the realities facing those people who actually live in the US, and I think they’re in for some pretty tough times ahead.

I really hope everyone, regardless of where they live, can use the current economic situation as an excuse to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and imported goods, and rather look towards promoting local economies together with environmentally friendly and locally produced products.  I know that’s what I intend to do!  It’s what’s going to be best for all of us in the long run.