Last
month I talked about why I finally installed the
Google Toolbar, and began an experiment to gauge the effectiveness
of that simple action on a new site's ranking.
There
is no good short version of this, so if you haven't read it, read
Part I now. I'll wait right here 'till you get
back.
After a
few days, I began the second phase of the experiment and I'll give
you the update on that here.
Like I said
last month, these sites were developed for a paying client, so I
had to begin showing some progress (one of the sites is to evolve
from a "corporate presence" site to a marketing site),
so meta tags were added for the appropriate keywords and
description on each page of the "marketing site", and
manual submission was done to Google, AllTheWeb, and DMOZ.
Again,
no changes have been made to the "corporate presence"
site. Net effect in the Google page rankings on the toolbar? Zilch, Nada.
Disappointed?
Not really. Google ranking is advertised to be based on
external links. We have identified a few very targeted sites
that we want to negotiate linking relationships with, but no
contact has been made with these sites, yet - so there is really
no reason to expect Google to change their ranking of either
site.
We still haven't proved
or disproved the original 3rd party statement that prompted this
whole exercise. We don't know what, if anything, Google may
have recorded about our sites, but we do have an indication that there is
no
effect on the rankings, with no incoming links.
I
also mentioned that I have had the Alexa toolbar installed in my
browser for years. Here is where it starts to get a little
interesting. Alexa ranks the "marketing" site (the
one that was submitted to the search engines) more than twice as high
as that
of the "corporate presence" site.
So,
in about 3 weeks time, the site that was submitted to the search
engines is being ranked significanty higher by Alexa, even though
the site is for a very targeted niche, and has only been submitted
to 3 general purpose search engines/directories. At this
point, the "marketing" site does come up in various
Google searches, but with its very low ranking I don't think I can
credit that as the cause for the difference.
Is
the submission to Google, paired with the fact that Google is
aware of traffic to the site (by virtue of my testing with the
Google toolbar installed), a cause for some increase in ranking
somewhere? I doubt it. There is just no real evidence
of that anywhere.
I may never
understand what has caused this difference, because I need to get
those rankings boosted. I will be looking at more
optimization, the "marketing" site will be getting more
content, and the linking campaign will be started. As these
are B2B sites, we will also be submitting the sites to some very
targeted, industry specific directories, where I expect we will
probably receive more traffic than from the general search
engines.
I think
we have a a
significant confirmation of the worth of search engine listing,
but there are soon going to be too many variables to attribute
results to any one tactic.
Any improvement
from this point will have to be attributed to the more general
realm of "search engine optimization".
I
had planned to make the linking strategies a third experiment, and
if I can identify specific benefits that accrue from those I will
certainly report them here, but at this point it will have to be
more subjective observations. I'm afraid the
"control" has been sufficiently tainted that we couldn't
really call what will follow, an experiment.
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