Are Rankings Everything?
- 25 Comment
There’s quite a lot of talk on blogs about PageRank, Alexa and Technorati ratings. Some bloggers even seem to be trying to find ways to manipulate the rankings in their favour.
I was thinking though today, does this mean that many bloggers are perhaps forgetting why they started their blogs and what they hoped to achieve when they started out? Or perhaps you may think that the various rankings and goals go hand in hand.
As an example, in my own case my blog is about making money with free blogs. Therefore should it really concern me as to what my various rankings are if I am making money. That is after all the purpose of the blog.
I was wondering what other readers opinions are. Should we be going all out to increase our rankings by whatever means? Or should we stay true to the things we hoped to achieve when we first dipped our toe into the blogosphere?
Good luck,
Mike.
Mike’s Money Making Mission
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25 Comments on this post
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Overwhelmed With Joy! said:
Rankings aren’t everything, but it’s easy to get sucked into the mentality that your blog isn’t “successful” unless you have a decent ranking.
I try to stay true to my original purpose of my blog…to share my adoption/parenting experiences with others in the hopes that they won’t feel quite as overwhelmed with it all like I did in the very beginning.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:19 pm -
Mike said:
Thank you for that. I think you are right in that it’s easy to get sucked into the rankings mentality. I suppose it depends on what is ‘really’ important.
There are, of course, benefits from the rankings that can help blogs – as long as we keep things in perspective.
Mike.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:49 pm -
Daniel Foscarini said:
I don’t care about rankings. What I do care about, is traffic, if rankings help bring new readers tot he site/s then great, more power to them. But what I really think is important is word of mouth, in real life, in chat rooms, etc. It is even better when I had nothing to do with it, if my site’s traffic goes up without me giving out the URL then I’m doing something right.
April 24th, 2007 at 6:03 pm -
Squirrel said:
I never really worried about ranking but somehow my ranking is pretty good I think. I’m not really sure what it means as I am not that computer literate. LOL. I just like to get alot of readers as I makes it all that much more fun.
April 24th, 2007 at 6:15 pm -
Ed the Editor said:
I assume that whatever your financial, personal or professional aims, building a readership is the key to success. Chasing the rankings to success by any means sounds a bit deluded – but it doesnt stop people doing it.
April 24th, 2007 at 7:06 pm -
Jason Spence said:
Since my site rankings are in the dumps, I’ll have to say that they are meaningless. That being said, if my rankings greatly improve, I’ll change my story and taught their importance. 😉
April 24th, 2007 at 7:08 pm -
Syaf The Geek said:
it’s hard to not get into that kind of ranking mentality but for me traffic and readership has always been important. It’s no use if you have high ranking but no one would read it. 😉
April 24th, 2007 at 11:13 pm -
Marloes said:
rankings I can do without, readers not…
April 25th, 2007 at 2:02 am -
Iskandar said:
For me, I think ranking is not everything but sometimes ranking will help you to increase your traffics and add more new readers to your blogs..:)
April 25th, 2007 at 2:04 am -
sexyinred said:
Ranking is definitely not everything but it does helps with the credibility of one blog to another.
I mean a blog with higher ranking don’t blog about craps so that’s why people keep visiting the blog(because they’re a reliable source) and thus the good rank they achieve right?
Blog who chase ranking but got nothing to offer will not work too in the end. 🙂
April 25th, 2007 at 2:58 am -
Mike said:
Thanks for all of the comments. It does seem that us Blog About Your Blog readers are not over awed by all of the stats. That’s interesting to know.
Of course there are advantages to a good PR and Alexa. For example: It means you can get better quality links in and it also puts more of a value on your blog if you are into doing sponsored posts. You can also get paid more for advertising etc. etc.
To me though it’s all about getting good traffic – without it we might as well shut up shop.
Good luck,
Mike.April 25th, 2007 at 7:17 am -
Maria said:
Good post, and good points Mike. Since my blog is about making money online, rankings do matter to me. As you mentioned, the better page rank, Alexa, Technorati and traffic stats you have, the more money you can command from writing sponsored reviews or hosting ad placements. It’s understandable that such things wouldn’t matter to the blogger who is really just blogging for recreation and community, but if you’re in it to make money, the benefits of good rankings can’t be ignored.
Prime example – I surfed over here from Sponsored Reviews.com because Blog About Your Blog had posted an opportunity and I wanted to check the site out. It’s required that your blog have a PR of 3+ in order to be considered.
Have a great day everyone!
– MariaApril 25th, 2007 at 8:02 am -
Cheysuli said:
Mike, I think that was a great summary about the advantages of good PR and Alexa. Having said that, I think there are blogs that naturally do well in the rankings because of their niche–I think blogs like this one which appeals to bloggers who are often looking for other blogs.
I have a very narrow niche that appeals to fewer people and thus to try and get a really high rank is much more difficult, though I have my sights set on a certain page rank just because it gives me a goal. I continue to blog for me and changes and improvements come because of I am trying to improve my work.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:54 am -
Jenny said:
Hi Mike, i was pondering this question myself especially today because I promised a friend to write a review for his blog. Should we really be that desperate for links and traffics? Every blog I go there are bound to be some guessing, reviews and linking stuff going on.
Cheers,
Jenny How
http://www.jennyhow.com
Chronicles of a full time eBay sellerApril 25th, 2007 at 9:11 am -
Mike said:
Maria: I think you are right, rankings are probably important to a money making blog. Though I must admit I pay more attention to keywords – so important to use them properly.
Cheysuli: Goals are good. If we don’t know where we are heading how do we know when we get there!?
Jenny: I’m not into all of the linking chains. To me it’s artificial and cosmetic. We do need links though as they seem to help with the search engine referrals etc.
Thanks everyone for the response.
Good luck,
Mike.April 25th, 2007 at 12:40 pm -
ryan444123 said:
Rankings shouldn’t be everything for a blog. If you are having fun and enjoying blogging that is what should be important. I have seen way too many bloggers going by the wayside because they were blogging for business, not for the pure enjoyment.
April 25th, 2007 at 1:09 pm -
Psycho Dude said:
“Goals are good. If we don’t know where we are heading how do we know when we get there!?”
Goals in life can change though, and if you blog about your own life, you can pretty much end up blogging without a real goal quite easily.I think that too many people are starting to focus on rankings for the incorrect reasons. This isn’t totally to blame though on the blogger I must say, but more the entire blogosphere which is totally based around rankings.
Topblogs are determined in a lot of locations by most visitors, not by highest quality of posting. In order to get most visitors directly search engine ranking plays a big role yet again and then there’s of course technorati ranking based on back-linking to you.
The multitude of these are all used in further items like in example payperpost and other sponsored blogging opportunities. Rather than getting paid for the amount of visitors get to read the article you write it is of more importance to have it placed on a ranked site.
Myself I can care less about ranking when it comes to my blog, it simply serves no real purpose. The only reason I blog is simply because I like to write every now and then and that’s exactly what I do. Because I’m relatively young and life is still pretty hectic with changes being made, along with the blog being set up without a true goal, it would even not make any sense to really care about rankings. Because where as for a couple of months I can be totally into this, it can be that the next.
In the end there’s one person I blog for truly, and that’s myself. Readers are nice, and I do enjoy input from other people on what I write, but as it is not a real priority for me I also let the entire ordeal of rankings pass by and let it be.
So far just letting it be has given me a PR of 2 anyways and that has pretty much been set a long time ago, wouldn’t surprise me if by now it would be going up to 3 the next time PR gets updated. To me it pretty much shows that actually trying to get PR up by spending lots of time in it what I have done with some more focussed sites, or simply doing nothing about it, doesn’t really matter that much. A lot just comes by time anyways in some form already if you simply build up a presence on the web.
April 25th, 2007 at 4:03 pm -
Lee said:
It seems way too easy to get caught up in that type of stuff. Rankings never really interested me until the other day Matt shot me over an email congratulating me on making the top 100 blogs in Australia with Quit Your Day Job and I thought that’s really cool and over the last couple of days started to get overly concerned about it (obsessed really) and I’m fairly certain my blogging experience is poorer for it. So I have to shake that off and be happy with just blogging. Great article and comments!!
April 25th, 2007 at 5:04 pm -
cooper said:
I suppose to make money one needs a ranked blog.
I never really got that part of it.I admit to getting a kick out of having readers and even the variety of mail – some strange some hateful some funny – I would probably miss that.
The other stuff – eh.
Never give it a thought. I put by blogroll on a second page and now put all new people I read on my reader so to me the linkage game and the rating game is not something in am involved in.The reader game, well it’s nice to have a small pile of readers and emailers.
Without that really all blogger would just have to go away, wouldn’t they.April 25th, 2007 at 8:25 pm -
cooper said:
Actually I mistyped my email. ;0
April 25th, 2007 at 8:25 pm -
Windy said:
Well, when I started my food blog, my aims were:
1) hopefully to provide easy, simple and quick cooking recipes for others,
2) to find something to do in my spare time,
3) to improve my English through writingHowever, sometime I do feel a bit sad when there are not many people to read my blog and the rank is low. I started to do something recently to make people aware of my blog existence: e.g. join BE.
So I guess ranking is not everything, and those 3 points above are still my aims. But it would be nice if I just want to find a way to get more people to read my blog and come back.
April 26th, 2007 at 1:52 am -
Sam Chan said:
When everybody employed shortcuts to improve their blog ranking, all the ranking becomes useless and topsy-turvy. One can no more tell whether a blog is really rank high because of the content. We can’t tell anymore whether favorites blog are really favorites or fakeries!
These are happening in digg, technorati favorites, meme, link exchanges, traffic exchange, blog roll. Somehow many are inviting friends to dig, link, etc.
Well, people nowadays no more have patience. Everybody want instant success!
I wrote a post about this:
http://acquirewisdom.blogspot.com/2007/04/looking-for-instant-success.htmlApril 29th, 2007 at 8:24 am -
Mike said:
There have been some exceptional comments and I’d like to express my thanks for them all.
In a way I was thinking along the lines of Sam above when I first wrote the post. Not that I think we need patience – it’s okay, I believe, to work hard and get results quickly.
What I wonder about is that perhaps all of the chains are giving false ratings – so in the end we all join in and we have an even more make believe world than the Internet already is.
No matter what, good luck!
Mike.April 29th, 2007 at 2:00 pm -
Beth said:
Rankings certainly are not everything. My goal from the beginning has been to socialize with others who share the same interests, find my blog interesting etc,. My writing has changed but the focus of my blog has not. I don’t write as much about my personal life as I did in the beginning, but that is a personal choice. I have read blogs lately that to me contain no substance. Sure, I write paid posts, but I don’t spam my readers like some. Yet these are the blogs who have the higher rankings and people seem to flock to, something I don’t understand in the least. I think all of us as bloggers need to take a step back and remember why we started blogging.
April 29th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
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