Tonight on twitter I caught the buzz about someone losing their google pagerank, due to having had normal links (ie not no follow) in sponsored posts. Hard on the heels of that discussion there was a groundswell of questions. What is pagerank? Why does it matter? What’s a nofollow link anyway*? And so on. And I went on to have an interesting chat about where traffic for blogs come from anyway.
You see, I’m not that convinced that Google and its pagerank are all that important for blogs. Sure, if you want to sell advertising, most companies are probably going to check what your pagerank is, but if you aren’t, why would you be bothered?
Would you be worried about losing your google derived traffic? Does it deliver you good, interested, dedicated blog followers?
It’s my suspicion that most traffic to blogs from search engines falls into two categories. There are the ppl who arrive at a single clearly targeted post – such as for example my camping list. For a while that ranked top of google’s search for a camping list, I think it’s still on the first page. And I’m sure for most ppl it’s quite a useful resource. However, if they are looking for camping resources I doubt the rest of the somewhat eclectic ramblings here interest them, and I assume they are in the portion of traffic which bounces away again.
The rest of the search related traffic is probably slightly surprised at where they find themselves. For whatever reason a post here is thrown up as a good match for what they are looking for, when it manifestly isn’t, and they probably bounce immediately.
Bounce rate is another thing we’re told to worry about. But actually, for a blog, a high bounce rate isn’t so bad. After all, you hope most ppl are passing by regularly, so there should only be one new post for them to read, they read it and then bounce away. You’re looking for a reasonable percentage of recurring visitors, and ppl who’ve arrived from a search engine probably aren’t going to join in with them.
If you’re looking at your stats, there are all sorts of interesting things in there. You can find out what percentage of visitors are new, or which come back. You can find out how long they tend to stay on site, where they come from (around the world), where they came from (referring site). My top referring site is twitter – measure of how much time I spend on there I suspect. But I also get a good number of visitors from posts I write on other sites, such as Emma’s Diary blog. (What, you haven’t read it? But I’m scintillating on there. Rivetting. Pop over and check 🙂 )
And there are other useful places to pick up traffic. Stumbleupon. Pinterest. Facebook. Social networks with user generated links, entirely possibly delivering better quality traffic thaqn search engines? Ever wondered why google is putting so much effort into g+? It’s because they suspect social is the future of the web, and in that world, how is pagerank going to be relevant at all?
*It’s a link that has rel=”nofollow” in it, telling search engines they shouldn’t give weighting to it.
I’m fascinated by my blog stats, but I’m not really convinced I BELIEVE them. According to blogger, I’m regularly read by people in Thailand, Russian, Brazil, Malaysia, France, Germany, Italy and many others.
Not one of these people ever comment. America, Canada & the UK I can believe and in fact I converse with these people.
But the Ukraine?! I don’t think so!
Giggle. Hold a delurking day and exhort everyone to comment?
I think I’d be hurting if I lost my google visitors, but then what I write doesn’t appeal to a mass audience.
I’ll take anyone I can get at the moment!
I don’t understand why you don’t have loads of traffic, I love your writing and your pictures. Bizarre.
It depends on why you’re blogging. I generally blog to avoid boring people on Facebook and think the idea of raising money from it is a mirage not worth pursuing. If you actually want people to read what you’re saying beyond a few friends and the occasional stranger, then pagerank would be a good idea. It comes down to whether you want to express yourself or communicate.
I don’t see how pagerank will benefit you there, probably better to join one of the myriad blog networks, they are yet another way to promote your writing. Basically I’m not convinced that search traffic benefits blogs.
If your writing sponsored posts then the person/company doing the sponsoring is going to want to know that their site is going to get seen so pagerank helps convince them of that. If your not going to write sponsored posts, take any sort of advertising in, sell any products through the site or intentionally write a post that is aimed at being searched specifically for then your right pagerank doesn’t matter as you have no real ‘need’ for google.
People look for specific things when googling. If they are looking for hints on finding the LEGO fig they are looking for in blind packs then my post about it will help them greatly but if they are looking for daddy blogs they’ll find a site like britmums or whatever and find my blog that way. My largest referer by far is google and get about 80% of my traffic from it on average.
As a commenter said above, one of my favorite things in my stats is the map in Google Analytics where it shows how many people are coming from different countries all over the world. I like to imagine someone in Tel Aviv, Kuala Lumpur, Perth, or Khathmadu sitting in front of their computer being helped by information I’ve put online. Such fun.
I looked just to see and Blogger is #1 and Google #2 in my referrals. You know I don’t pay attention to these things so I won’t be doing anything with links or not with links.
Thanks for posting this, makes for interesting reading and I missed the discussion on Twitter. I’m really not that focussed on my stats tho if I’m honest. It’s interesting that a good swathe of my readers are from the US but apart from that I tend to ignore them!
Interesting read. I don’t worry about our pagerank, or check the data often. I’m not sure I think of myself as a blogger even 🙂
Stuart
I completely agree. I’ve not stuck with blogs I found through google. The blogs I obsessively read are all found through word of mouth in real life or online. As for my blog, the highest referrer by far is Twitter. Social has taken over.