Weblogging, Google and Hits
When writing a website, the hardest part is getting any kind of traffic. What's to be done?
I look at this website, which was originally written as a personal attempt to get my head around PHP and MySQL, and I reckon it's pretty good - as far as weblogs go. The functionality and back-end systems create a really robust website, and a bunch of the functionality is hidden from most users - private groups, private messaging, advertising management software... In many ways I'm quite proud of it.
But here's the rub... My traffic stays low, and I oscillate between 0 and 1 google pagerank. It's not that I really want to be a popular page (I probably can't afford the bandwidth anyway), but the amount of effort that goes into creating a truly unique (Ok - influenced by Slashdot, but relatively unique nonetheless) look and feel are wasted if the number of people who visit stays low.
So what's to be done. Well here are a few options I considered...
Reciprocal Linking
I spent much of today looking around the internet for sites I would feel comfortable linking to, and asking for a link from. But two things get in the way of this, and Groucho Marx would have loved me for this... I don't want any of the sites that would be likely to take me up on the offer to link to me in the first place, and the sites that I would like to have link to me, would probably not bother because they don't need a link in return, at least not from me.
Link Farms
Horrible, horrible things that pull search results out of the realm of the useful, and reduce the value of search engines dramatically. May they all rot in hell.
Paid Advertising
I make a net loss on this site, despite the fact that its hosted with one of the (in my opinion) most cost effective hosting companies in the UK (this is them) so I'm not likely to spend additional cash on it unless I find a way to make money from it - which isn't really the point of the site in the first place...
Spamming
The most loathsome behaviour on the internet, enough said.
Use of fake keywords
Not very honest, and likely to get me delisted from the most valuable search engines.
Niche presence
This actually works - take the movie reviews for example - the review of Leo is one of the most popular links on the site. Why? Because it's an unreleased film that very few people have seen, and since I have a review on my site thanks to Incandenza (who saw the movie in London upon its initial screening), the 2/3000 people who actually want to read about it actually do come via my site, because it's quite exclusive (if obscure) content. I'd like to do more of this, but the problem is the population of a niche is small, and 2/3000 hits is not a big number, none of these people register, and few if any come back, mainly because they didn't even notice the URL, they were just here for the review.
So What's Left?
Too many companies out there offer services to fix this problem, and too many people out there are trying to solve this problem through gaming the system. I'd rather be known for the content and regular updates my site actually can claim to have than some neat trick that lures unwilling browsers to my site.
But there's a catch...
It's a critical mass game. Once you've got enough interested parties (especially spontaneous links), you get enough hits that the googlebar and the general awareness of the existence of your website rises above the low-water mark. From there, its a few short steps to a small regular readership and you can start to feel like you're building something. Getting there legitimately is a long. hard. slog. I'm trying to do this right, but hell it ain't easy, this doesn't pay the bills.
So my conclusion is this: It stinks, but I'm not going to compromise on the legitimacy of this site's actual hit-rate by playing silly games with the search engines - I want my rating on Google to tell me something (and not how well I gamed the system). Google will let me know when I've successfully broken through, whereas other webmasters sometimes seem to think that Google is the tool that will enable them to break through. I have to hope that their program is good enough, and my content is good enough, that I will eventually get somewhere closer to the top of the listings than page 7 of the search results.
In the meantime, I keep writing, giving away free advertising (that amazingly no-one takes me up on - I do get a few hundred hits a day you know!) and hoping that someone gets to liking my writing. Perhaps there are more optimal ways of getting to the top of the various listings, but I like what I'm doing here. Although I'd also like to be higher in the search rankings, I have to make a choice.
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Posted by nlvp at February 20, 2003 03:59 AM