

Page Rank 0 to 4 in Under Four Months, How I did it - thinkbohemian
http://blog.whyspam.me/index.php/2010/04/16/page-rank-0-to-4-in-under-four-months/

======
qeorge
Really well written article, thanks for sharing. One thing I would change
though:

 _"It is hosted under blog.whyspam.me because a subdomain’s PR goes towards
the main site."_

In my research and experience, its more beneficial for SEO to host your blog
at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of blog.mydomain.com. The reason being that
Google treats subdomains as different sites.

You're still linking from the blog to the main site, so a good bit of PageRank
will pass through, but you might have an even better impact were the blog
hosted on the same subdomain.

Cheers!

~~~
csomar
I would prefer to use blog.mydomain.com and then do a 301 redirect to bring
all Google juice into the main domain.

~~~
drm237
301 redirects don't pass 100% link juice so why waste backlinks to a subdomain
that you don't plan on actually using? Are you just saying have it available
as a convenience thing in case someone tries to guess your blog URL?

~~~
thinkbohemian
Is that true? what about 302 redirects?

As far as the guessing for blog name if your 404 pages are good enough it
won't matter, for me if you go to <http://whyspam.me/blog> they'll still see
the link to the blog, even though you're viewing a 404 page.

~~~
qeorge
Avoid 302 redirects, they pass no PageRank.

301's do dampen PageRank as well, though the exact amount is not known. I've
always put it around 10-15% (i.e., after each 301 you are left with 85% of the
original value). I also suspect that its contextual - so a 301 from
www.mydomain.com to mydomain.com would probably be dampened less than a 301 to
a completely different domain (e.g., bit.ly).

------
thinkbohemian
This is the process I took to get to page rank 4 from january to april. Before
this I've never had a page rank 4 website, so while i'm sure I could do this
again in much less time, I wanted to give those getting started an idea of
what they can do to improve their PR, and demystify the whole process. With so
many articles like "PR5 in 5 days", it can be demoralizing to not see results
for awhile.

I did not spend a full 4 months on SEO alone either. I have another full time
job, and was also working on usability studies etc. Enjoy, and let me know if
you have any questions!

------
vaksel
not to sound negative, but Google doesn't update the public PR information in
real time...they do it once every ~4-5 months. So your "PR jumped to 1" "PR
jumped to 2" etc doesn't hold much water. I'm guessing you just saw that PR
jumped to 4, so you extrapolated your efforts backwards.

~~~
thinkbohemian
The update in PR was from the corresponding jumps I saw on my search keywords
in google webmasters as well as actual PR. I saw 0 in december/january, and
then noticed a jump of search rankings in feb. In late march my page rank was
actually observed as 3 and then in april around the 6th I saw that my PR was
reported as 4. Which was accompanied by another jump in my keyword rankings.

Update - I put a note at the bottom of the article to better reflect how I got
the numbers.

------
djhomeless
I guess I would question the value in striving for high PR. Modern SEO is far
more about engaging with the social scene than hunting down obscure link
directories/blogs.

If you have a cool service, then find a way to get people to tweet about it.
imho, a far more relevant way to drive awareness.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Google can send you a ton of high value traffic. Getting on Google page 1 can
be done (almost) by yourself, without having to convince others to tweet,
blog, share on facebook, etc. Plus, once you're there, it takes very little
effort to stay, as compared with staying relevant in the social web.

Social is the hot thing right now, but when you're starting at zero, SEO is
still a great way to bootstrap yourself to decent traffic.

~~~
ericd
Yep, the bursty, generally curious (rather than intentful) traffic from social
media links absolutely pales in comparison with the consistent, large, and
high-converting amount of traffic Google can send.

Social media is much better at engaging with customers to get feedback and
figure out where the holes in your product are.

------
bkbleikamp
Not actually that impressive, as Page Rank is an exponential scale.

[http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/07/24/climbing-
page-...](http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/07/24/climbing-page-rank-
mountain/)

~~~
thinkbohemian
Good link, i like the graph. As i've mentioned in previous comments, i'm not
trying to impress, just inform. It maybe obvious to you what is needed to go
up in page rank, but it wasn't obvious to me, so i did some research and now
here I am!

------
shadowsun7
When I first started writing at my site, I got to PR 4 in about 6 months or
so. And I didn't really check my score for about four months.

My strategy was really simple: produce good content, and the readers (and
links) will come. Nothing more, nothing less (well ... maybe a few common-
sense initial tweaks at the start, like readable-permalinks and Google-
friendly sitemaps). So maybe this isn't the most efficient way of scoring a
high PR, but I believe that good content is more valuable in the long run than
a artificially boosted good position in a search engine.

~~~
thinkbohemian
Good content drives good SEO, and good SEO drives people to your good content.
It really is a chicken-and-egg scenario when it comes to search engine
optimization. Ultimately is no way to artificially boost your position for
long, and your content will have to drive visitors.

------
sosuke
The site is also listed in dmoz.org (almost impossible to get included in
these days)

The biggest part of "how he did it" was creating something people wanted to
share and link too. The feature on killerstartups got him past PR2, which I
haven't been able to do after a year on any of my sites. Then Shady Email got
him to 4.

It was much less hard work than I was hoping, it was much more the development
of a fun idea related to another previously successful site, Shady URL

~~~
thinkbohemian
If you get your link included in a number of directories and that number is
greater than the number of outgoing links you should be able to at least get
up to PR3 without much difficulty. If not, use google webmaster to see if your
site is being flagged for doing something wrong.

------
spokey
Richard, thank you for writing this up.

I have two questions and a minor bug report for you:

1) It seems you were tracking your Page Rank closely in this time period. Can
you quantify the relationship between PR and actual rank or organic search
traffic on your site? (I.e., do you know and can you share stats like "At PR N
I had X organic search visitors per month"?). This will be obviously be
different from site to site (as it depends on query frequency) but these would
be interesting data to see.

2) I didn't take the time to watch the video, but you can briefly explain what
WhySpamMe is? Is this essentially mailinator except with forwarding to your
actual email address? (That's not a knock on WhySpamMe, I'm just trying to
understand it. I actually think that's an interesting twist.)

3) Just FYI, I noticed that on an earlier post on your blog
([http://blog.whyspam.me/index.php/2010/02/13/whyspam-me-
suppo...](http://blog.whyspam.me/index.php/2010/02/13/whyspam-me-supports-
hati/)) you misspelled "Haiti" as "Hati" a couple of times. For that matter, I
think "Unicef" should be "UNICEF" (all caps), as it is an acronym. That's the
way they seem to spell it officially (although their logo is all lower case,
so go figure.)

~~~
thinkbohemian
1) I'm planning another article later with some stats and some notes on
usability (specifically about how adding the video you didn't watch lead to a
huge increase in conversions).

2) I don't like comparing services to other services "the facebook of dog
kennels!" but yes we act much like mailinator though we forward the emails to
your actual email account. This is much more convenient IMHO and since the
email accounts never expire you can use it for services you actually care
about such as amazon.com etc.

What mailinator and the others don't do is keep track of which websites send
you unsolicited spam, or sell your info. We keep track of this and publish it
to <http://whyspam.me/websites>.

3) Thanks, there's a reason I became an engineer and not an english major ^_^
I'll fix the spelling as soon as i get a chance.

------
BrandonFletcher
Anything less than a PR6 isn't really spectacular.

~~~
thenduks
Agreed. My site went from 0-3 in about 6 months and I did absolutely nothing
(and I mean _nothing_ , I just wanted to write so I haven't considered SEO
even a little) except write some blog articles.

~~~
thinkbohemian
Great, just a little more work and you can get PR4 with not much problem!

------
daeken
I've never really paid attention to PR (although apparently my blog is sitting
at 4 without trying anything, which is kind of neat), but I'd really like to
see is a graph of Page Rank over time. Does such a service exist? I doubt it
would be easy to do so for any arbitrary page, but even a way to add my site
to it and check it occasionally (perhaps get email alerts when the status
changes?) would be cool.

------
fuzzmeister
"During March, i was featured in killerstartups.com, i saw a big spike in
traffic, and resulted in a lot of ‘me too’ articles from other websites in
other languages."

If you ever want a few dozen free visitors and some links, submit to
KillerStartups - their ridiculous posting schedule means that they write about
pretty much anything you submit, in my experience.

------
spxdcz
I launched Penolo (a twitter app for sharing sketches: <http://penolo.com>) a
little under 3 weeks ago; it's already PageRank 4 (if you can believe the
checkers).

Didn't do any link-building, just happened.

I guess give people a reason to link to you: saves you a few months of effort.

~~~
spxdcz
I should point out, I linked to it from my personal site, which is a Pagerank
5, and probably didn't hurt... :)

~~~
thinkbohemian
Wish i had some PR 5 sites under my belt.

~~~
raffi
My site, Feedback Army is PR5. I still don't get that much of my traffic from
search engines.

~~~
thinkbohemian
If that's the case use tools such as wordtracker's to see if the keywords that
you're targeting get enough traffic. You could also be competing on some
keywords where your competition has a higher PR. Or possibly the customers you
want simply don't think to use search engines to find your type of service.
What percentage of your traffic comes from search engines?

~~~
raffi
I've looked at Google's Keyword Tool and tried a bunch of different
possibilities. There are certain keywords I'm targeting but despite my PR5
pagerank, I'm not at the top of the page on these yet. So it's a slow move
forward. Still people continue to write about FBA so I expect this is a long
term investment. As my site gets more quality links and longevitiy, I expect
one day I may see more search traffic for the terms I'm targeting. Just not
yet. A lot of the search traffic I get is people searching for feedback army
by name. I take this as an encouraging sign about awareness of the product
itself.

~~~
thinkbohemian
I think that is good as well. Generally a large portion of my traffic is
direct traffic. Most visitors when they discover my site have a need to
generate a email address, but the next day or later that afternoon many will
go directly to my url. I typically see a spike in users the day _after_ i see
a spike in traffic. All this SEO stuff can certainly take a long time and not
seem to be paying off, FBA seems like a great service that I would like to use
in some upcoming usability reviews. Just hang keep up the good work, and one
day you'll be #1

------
kadavy
<http://blog.kadavy-inc.com/> got on the front page of HN one time, and became
PR4 almost instantly. I did link this blog _to_ my personal site, which is a
PR4 - however, that site does not link back.

~~~
kadavy
Well, so much for that. Now Google Chrome and Twitter both think my site
serves malware. Anybody know what to do about this?

~~~
thinkbohemian
where are you getting that from, check out
[http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://bl...](http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://blog.kadavy-
inc.com/)

google says everything is working ok

------
brandnewlow
If any SEOs are out there reading this, we're looking for a consult at my
startup. Check profile.

~~~
ApolloRising
What do you need help with exactly? Happy to help

------
ez77
How does he know his Page Rank score? I didn't know such values were made
public.

~~~
trafficlight
It's not a secret at all. The Google Toolbar will tell you.

<http://toolbar.google.com/>

~~~
271828183
And while it's telling you the pagerank it's sending your entire browsing
history* and then some back to google so the can store it in the google cave.

*probably minus https/intranet sites

