And the winner is…

Week seven is done, and with no changes in the rankings. Our triumphant winner is Guess Who’s Dead!

Site	Current Pagerank
Guess Who’s Dead	0
A Dollar Past Sunset	unranked
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	unranked
Caveat Robert	unranked
Dancing Videos Blog	unranked
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	unranked
Ken Wachsberger’s Blog	unranked
Mute’s Observations	unranked
Paris, Day One	unranked

Thanks to you all for taking up the gauntlet. And congratulations Guess Who’s Dead! We’ll be contacting you about your prize shortly.

I’m definitely interested in hearing what factors you think edged you ahead of the competition. What do you think of Dancing Videos Blog‘s theory that your implementation of Google Ads was the deciding factor?

Week Six Update

Week six and no change in the rankings since last week. But with just one week left we again have a new challenger!

Site	Current Pagerank
Guess Who’s Dead	0
A Dollar Past Sunset	unranked
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	unranked
Caveat Robert	unranked
Dancing Videos Blog	unranked
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	unranked
Ken Wachsberger’s Blog	unranked
Mute’s Observations	unranked
Paris, Day One	unranked

pro tip #4: courtesy of GeekLad

GeekLad boils it down. Achieve PageRank by getting links to your articles that aren’t rel=”nofollow” and come from sites with PageRank.

Week Five Update

No changes since last week except that ObituQueries is withdrawn, as Guess Who’s Dead was actually its replacement.

Site	Current Pagerank
Guess Who’s Dead	0
A Dollar Past Sunset	unranked
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	unranked
Caveat Robert	unranked
Dancing Videos Blog	unranked
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	unranked
Ken Wachsberger’s Blog	unranked
Mute’s Observations	unranked

pro tip #3: social media

Google doesn’t decide PageRank for your articles just by processing the content of what you’ve written and how your site presents it. It relies mostly on the opinion of the whole Internet to calculate your PageRank; and it measures the opinion of the Internet by looking at inbound links to your site from other sites. It assumes that if people are linking to you in a meaningful way, that you must be relevant.

So pro tip #3 is about using social media to get meaningful inbound links:

• Explore link-sharing sites like Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, and Reddit.com. These sites are specifically designed for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. People post links to stories they think others will be interested in. The site visitors then vote on the stories they like and (theoretically) the best stories rise to the top or “go popular,” which can result in MAJOR exposure for your link. Because popular stories syndicate out and get picked up by other venues on the web. Even just submitting your stories to these kinds of content sharing sites, whether the stories go popular or not, definitely improves your SEO findability. However… (see the cautionary bullet below)
• There are some cardinal rules for using content sharing sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. Before you post ANYTHING, spend some time getting familiar with the site and how people interact on it. These sites are all about community and behaving yourself within the community. No one minds if you occasionally post your own links – provided that you’re participating in the community, voting on other stories that aren’t your own, posting stories that aren’t your own, commenting on stories, etc. If you try to use these sites solely for self-promotion and don’t participate, you will quickly be labeled as a spammer and nothing you post will ever go popular.
• Identify major sites that are thematically similar to your blog. Join those sites and become a part of their message-board/comment area communities. Most boards/comments allow you to have a user-name that sometimes can function as a link back to your site. If you participate in site discussions, it will give you credibility in the community and people might start clicking back through your links. If you become enough of a fixture on these sites, you can even start posting links to your own posts without annoying people.
• Once you’ve found larger sites that are similar to yours, start looking for arenas where you can post links to your own blog content. For example, the Internet Movie Database has a “links of the day” section at the bottom of their front page and they encourage people to submit stories about movies for consideration. Another example is Amazon.com. They have a robust thematically-organized messageboard system. If you post a link in their Science Fiction board community, that link syndicates out to every Amazon book page that’s been tagged as “science fiction.” Go to sites you like, that fit with your blog, and see if you can find these avenues to promote your links.
• Use sites like Google Trends to show you what people are searching on. If it’s appropriate, you can start tailoring your content to match popular search trends. However, if there’s nothing that seems to be an organic fit for your blog, don’t bother. If you try to force content onto your blog just to pander to users, it almost never works. But if you like writing about health and you see “swine flu” is an insanely popular term, it wouldn’t be out of character for you to discuss it.
• Social media loves lists. Don’t know why, but messageboards, Facebook, content sharing sites like Digg… they all love lists. 10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Swine Flu, 20 Best Post-Apocalyptic Movies, 5 Ways to Can Bake Better Cupcakes – posts structured like that are extremely popular on social media and with search engines. If you really wanted to tailor some blog content specifically to appeal to social media, lists would be a good place to start.
• The thing about social media is that it can’t be a one-way street. If you want Digg to drive you traffic, you have to participate on the site, so people will click your link. If you want Twitter to drive traffic, you have to Tweet and respond to people who Tweet you. If you start a Facebook page to drive traffic, you have to friend people, post content, etc. There is only so much you can do with automated feeds. With social media marketing, there has to be give and take and participation in larger communities, which – here’s the downside – can take a lot of time.

pro tip #2: get Google’s attention

This one’s quick. Y’all need to get Google’s attention if you’re going to move beyond “unranked”. Go to Google Blog Search, scroll down, and click the “Information for Blog Authors” link. And add your blog.

And while you’re at it, go to Technorati and do the same thing.

Week Four Update

Week four and no change in the rankings since last week. But we do have a new challenger!

Site	Current Pagerank
Guess Who’s Dead	0
A Dollar Past Sunset	unranked
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	unranked
Caveat Robert	unranked
Dancing Videos Blog	unranked
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	unranked
Ken Wachsberger’s Blog	unranked
Mute’s Observations	unranked
ObituQueries	unranked

pro tip #1: meta description and meta keywords

Okay, let’s turn this challenge up a notch. An important thing that contributes to your Google PageRank is a good description that’s representative of your blog’s focus, and good, representative keywords as well. Only one of you has meta keywords and they’re garbage that look they’re coming from the blog’s chosen theme.

Dig into your blog software’s options to figure out how to set a description and keywords. Then verify by pulling up the page source of your blog’s main page. You should see your description and keywords tagged like this in the page header:

Your keywords should be all the words and phrases you think your blog’s target audience might search on. Your description is the text that Google will show on a page of search results under the link to your blog, but it also contributes to your PageRank.

Week Three Update: We Have A Front Runner!

Three weeks into it and we have a front runner. Guess Who’s Dead emerges from the pack with a PageRank of 0.

Site	Current Pagerank
Guess Who’s Dead	0
A Dollar Past Sunset	unranked
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	unranked
Caveat Robert	unranked
Dancing Videos Blog	unranked
Mute’s Observations	unranked
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	unranked
ObituQueries	unranked

Alexa rankings

Larry has received a request for Alexa rankings. (Here’s a good article.) Whereas PageRank is Google scoring a site’s relevance, Alexa rankings are Alexa’s scoring of a site’s reach (number of unique users) and traffic. And those are certainly significant and meaningful criteria. But the method Alexa uses to accrue their data is quite dubious, Larry thinks. Alexa rankings are based on a small, self-selected and geographically skewed sample of internet users who’ve all installed the Alexa toolbar. Larry thinks the only thing Alexa rankings are good for is rough comparative intelligence when you don’t have access to accurate traffic data.

If an advertiser is looking to do a direct ad buy from a website, and wants to know what they’re getting for their money, the site owner can provide accurate traffic data. So you don’t see actual monetary transactions informed by Alexa rankings, not the way Google PageRank or actual traffic data gets used to inform ad pricing.

Larry toyed with the idea of having challenge participants configure their sites for tracking actual traffic via Google Analytics, but decided to save that maybe as the basis for a future challenge.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to roll up the Alexa rankings, just for fun:

Site	Alexa ranking
Caveat Robert	8
Dancing Videos Blog	5,102,695
Guess Who’s Dead	5,330,500
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	8,733,486
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	10,140,841
A Dollar Past Sunset	10,444,541
Mute’s Observations	13,531,075
ObituQueries	13,531,221

And if those results aren’t dubious, I don’t know what is. (Yes, low numbers are good.)

So to reiterate, the challenge winner is determined exclusively by Google PageRank.