WritingUp.com Growth
This is interesting. It tells 2 stories:
1. The power of user generated content
2. Search engines certainly aren’t telling the whole story.
1. Users are blogging on WritingUp.com. They write hundreds of blog entries each day. They also write thousands of comments each day.
Two weeks ago a site:writingup.com search revealed that google had 510,000 pages from the domain writingup.com in their index.
Today, the same search reveals 729,000 pages.
The community is growing.
2. It has always been said that search engines won’t want to index very many pages of a site that has low pagerank or that has very few links to it.
Well, with 729,000 pages indexed, google says that writingup.com has 2 incoming links.
It also has a pagerank of 3!
THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!
Google isn’t telling the truth here.
Want more proof?
Try a link:writingup.com search on msn:
12,158 incoming links
Or what about a linkdomain:writingup.com search on yahoo?
20,400 incoming links.
Something is wrong here.
Or, what about a site:writingup.com search on yahoo?
They only have 13,100 pages in their index. Huh?
Or, msn
8227? What? What are you guys thinking?
Why can google find over 700,000 pages on writingup.com, and msn can only find just over 8000? I mean, all the url’s on the site are clean. They don’t have index.php?somevar=somethingelse. Everything is linked to. There aren’t duplicate posts on the site (yet).
So, my point is, search engines aren’t telling the whole truth.
Also, if you’re still using what the search engines tell you as a metric of how successful your SEO campaign is going, you’re fooling yourself (or, they’re fooling you, just like they’d like to do).
Comments on WritingUp.com Growth »
The search engines are definitely misreporting or using old data.
My site has about 130 results on MSN, 147 on Yahoo, and 3 (!) on Google. It’s been up for a year, and google has reported as many as 79 pages. My pagerank is reporting kind of upside down, too–my main blog page has a PR of 2, whereas the category pages have a PR of 4 or 5.
Here’s a question: why would my indexed pages disappear from Google? It’s not like I’m banned, or I wouldn’t have any pages listed at all.
I have no idea. Could it be that google is finding multiple pages with the exact same content on them? Doesn’t seem likely.
As far as I can tell they’re doing some wacko stuff right now.
Many of the blog pages don’t have comments on them yet, and so the content is repeated on the main page, but there were a good number of other pages with unique content that got delisted, too.
I’m going to try a few things to see if I can’t get them indexed again. Thanks for the thought, and I’ll let you know if I figure out even part of what is going on.
Depends on what type of links are pointing to your site. Also, Google has never showed all inbound links using a link:mysite.com search because they don’t want their secrets out about their algo’s. Yahoo would be the best to use as the links are also listed in ascending order by quality.
What kind of referrer stats are you receiving from the SE’s?
In google you need a space after link: to get the most accurate number
link: writingup.com – shows 114,000 BL’s
link: http://www.writingup.com – shows 109,000 BL’s
-D
The problem with that is it doesn’t exactly show back links. It just shows how many times the word writingup.com shows up on a page.
If you do that first search (link: writingup.com), the first two results are rss feeds. The sixth one is on jensense.com and she’s not linking to me, it’s just in the text of a trackback.
Not that I’m paranoid, but there’s certainly something very odd going on with Google. One of the websites that I administer has disappeared from their listings entirely — nope, they say, it doesn’t exist!
But it’s been thoroughly indexed and decently ranked for several years now, and has many incoming links of high quality. The site itself is a happy useful inoffensive well-targeted site with relevant content that’s updated regularly.
The only significant change made in the same time period was that we decided to drop (most of) the Adsense ads from the site in favour of more specific affiliate programs… coincidence, do you think?
So I just barely started reading this blog and did the site:writeup.com command on Google. Has something changed in the past few weeks? Jonas says he got over 700,000 results. I got 42,700. Still an impressive amount, but a fraction of what has been stated.
Soon after I wrote that post I put a NOINDEX tag on most of the pages on writingup. You can see my post about it here.
Basically, I’m trying to get all of writingup.com indexed on very targeted sub-domains, instead of all on one domain.
shmula » when bad things happen to good blogs : Business, Technology, and Stuff in Between @ 3:49 am
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