No PR to PR 4 in just 6 Weeks …

Posted by Rainer on November 6th, 2007 at 03:00am

I started my space blog roughly six weeks ago. It was an experiment for me: would it be possible to get search engine visibility quickly. After all, the blog was about a space shuttle launch that happened within five weeks of me starting the blog. And, I have to admit, the blog was also a lot of fun, so not much to lose if the experiment would fail.

A lot of folks advised me not to promote the blog quickly, as this would put me into the sandbox for sure. But with just 4 weeks to go (and one week to get traffic), what was to be lost?

So I started to promote the blog and obviously, it worked. After roughly three weeks, I noticed first hits coming from Google. They grew and grew and so the timing seems to have been perfect. A week ago, I noticed that the blog had gained page rank. And, guess what: it was immediately at page rank 4 (I thought to be lucky if I got 1 or 2, but obviously Google was trusting me more). I even waited that week to see if it is temporary, but PR 4 is still there today. So I thought I share the good news.

What did I do? A few basic things:

First of all, I created good content. Except for the very first days, I made sure that I had at least one post each day. Some days had as much as four or five posts - but never overdone, only if justified by events.

I made sure that I got backlinks from relevant (and well-known) forums. That was easy, because the content was great, so I could always find a reason to post a link to my blog entries. Of course, that still required effort as I needed to view forum threads to find matching ones (with this pet project, though, that was part of the fun…).

I also searched for blogs on similar topics. There, I posted comments. Some of them pointed to specific pages of my blog. On others, I just left the generic blog URL with my name. From the later, I had expected nothing as I thought today all of them would have a NOFOLLOW tag. But Google Webmaster Tools tells me that at least some of them qualify as actual backlinks.

I also went to social bookmarking services and posted links to relevant pages. Here, I used only very good content and made sure that it was almost exclusive, at least for a few minutes That turned out in traffic spikes, but any long-term effect is yet to be seen.

I posted links on some other sites of mine. Thankfully a have a few PR 4+ sites and on some them it was appropriate to post links. I stayed back from posting links from everywhere. I kept close attention that I did not do any irrelevant linking (which would also hurt the other sites).

I also did a single ezinearticles.com article on the topic. That was timed to be close before launch (the culmination of the blog) and at least the timing worked out nicely. The traffic spike, however, I can not really detect because it came together with lots of other traffic starting shortly before launch day. Google Webmaster Tools does not yet tell me any backlinks from there, but I hope it will show some effect over time.

That’s more or less all I did. Most importantly, I intentionally stayed away from asking old friends to link to that page. The blog, however, made a few new ones and I got links from most of them. Besides that, I waited patiently for the outcome of my experiment and waited for the result. Of course, most of the time I kept adding content. The site is now at 110+ pages and still growing.

I have to admit two things:

First, the domain I host it under is in existence for quite a while. However, I used a brand-new subdomain. Most experts will tell you that this does not bring you any boost in search engines. I concur to this finding. So the domain age was probably irrelevant here.

The second thing is far more important: I targeted the blog on “space launch viewing”. This is a tiny, non-competitive niche. I think the success has much to do what that fact. So the traffic isn’t really soaring (and even less the income). However, I will now add a more broader range within the “space” theme. Again, part of that is because it is also personal fun. But it will be interesting to see if I can keep my page rank while extending the breadth of the site (I suspect so). That would be an indication that it pays to focus on a very small niche just to expand it further over time.

I hope you find my experience report useful. Comments are always appreciated!

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