PSoTD

Good thing to have if you're posting files for download on the web.

Do you hate catblogging?

Daddy Democrat has some thoughts about my PageRank and blogging post of yesterday. I recommend you go read it. I think he taps into an essential part of blogging - the extension of discussion on a subject across many blogs. This isn't necessarily the unconnected discussion of various bloggers seizing upon a Washington Post article and blogging about it, but the mining of content-rich veins of discourse by bloggers who develop some expertise and knowledge about that subject, and the linking back to other bloggers with posts that serve as reference posts on the same topic. When food websites link to your blog, Google recognizes the value of your "Tacos Blog".

Which brings me to a separate wonder... how often do bloggers "coordinate" a topic or point to be blogged about at a given time? Often enough or too often, or just right? I've been in on a couple of these, but they've been in the vein of "What Does Labor Day Mean to You" or "Favorite Recipe" and not anything approaching a campaign or general pounding of some kind of talking point. I can't think of any examples off of the top of my head, but sometimes when I check Memeorandum, I think, there's a lot of bloggers that have put a lot of thought into posts TODAY about a subject, and I really don't see why they all chose that topic TODAY, particularly when the posts reference an article that is several days old.

On Saturday, March 10, 2007, at 3:13 PM Eastern Time, I made the following post:

Nude Ann Coulter Yes, I'm mean. Made you think of this.

But next weekend I'll let you know about the search results. Consider this bloggerpaper...

By March 11th, at 2:59 PM, I had my first visit to that post from a referral by the Google search engine. Not the Google Blog search engine, but www.google.com.

Since then, I've had over 100 Search Engine entries into my site for the terms nude ann coulter. I just did a search for "ann coulter nude" on Google. That post on PSoTD was the 11th shown result, with a reported 338,000 results findable by Google.

The point of this post isn't to show off my remarkable ability to bring visitors by posting about nude conservative hacks. Obviously, it isn't remarkable at all. Do I really want people looking for naked shots of Coulter on my site? Probably not. No, the point is to raise a question to all liberal political bloggers -

How did my post rank so highly on such a search, and so quickly?

The answer? PageRank.

And how does PSoTD have a decent PageRank?

I *think* it's from the links on blogrolls from much more highly linked blogs, like Firedoglake and Suburban Guerrilla. And from all the other blogs that link to PSoTD as well. It's cumulative and weighted, and every little bit of real linkage helps increase the PSoTD PageRank result. But in general, more "linked to" sites linking to your blog helps more in PageRank than less "linked to" sites.

There's been a lot of discussion about blogrolls over the last several years. And a lot of complaining about whether one blogger links to another blogger, etc., etc., etc. It all gets so personal, and we lose sight of the advantages of linking to others with our blogs - beyond the visitors we may send directly to that site through our blog, we also provide that site with a link value that Google and other search engines prioritize when creating programs for search output. Do any search on Google you want. It's very unlikely you won't find a wikipedia entry and several blog posts within the first twenty documents referenced. I did a search on tacos. . Results in the top twenty include a wikipedia post (first) and a couple of blogs. Before Taco Bell or Del Taco or Old El Paso... and it's because of the comparable strength of links to all these sites.

At some point, we have to start thinking about blogs beyond the day-to-day interest value and within the historical reference value, and when that time comes, it will impact how we do blogrolls. Who do we want to have content popping quickly within a search engine's output? Bloggers actually have some control over that at this point in time. When Eschaton links to something, the visibility of that site can improve considerably in search engines. When Eschaton links to Suburban Guerrilla, and Suburban Guerrilla links to PSoTD, PSoTD gets PageRank benefit from that as well. There's a food chain. It is distributive.

I have my blogroll to the right. I haven't used it much recently, and doubt I will use it much in the future. I've loaded all those blogs into my bloglines account, and I read their posts through there. I guess I could come up with something else to put in that web "real estate" and remove the blogroll, but I won't do that, because most of those blogs linked here and I think it's fair of me (as a relatively small blogger) to link back in kind, and secondly, I want them to have whatever "Google PageRank benefit" I can give them as well. This is easy for me to say, because I don't have thousands of bloggers linking here. I wouldn't expect a blogger with that kind of incoming link traffic to think this way - it's too much labor. But I do expect them to have some kind of a blogroll as a return gift of the distributive nature of the Internet for bloggers of interest. Other than that, it's up to each blogger to figure out their "blogroll policy".

All I want is for bloggers to keep in mind the impact on the search engines.

One last note - even though I have had over 100 visitors to the site searching for Ann Coulter Nude in little over a week, in the whole potential scope of internet searching, that isn't very many. I think that's a good sign for our society.

The hype continues.

Is it broadband-over-powerline technology?

I really thought more folks knew about Memeorandum.

Not really sure I'd call the White House web site redesign an improvement. It is interesting that they are highlighting "podcasts".

This is one of those days for me. It makes me wonder if I should open this up more to be a group blog. I could have a sump pump blogger and an NCAA basketball blogger and a sports movie blogger (actually, that would probably be a cool blog in and of itself) and still provide similar kind of randomness provided today...

Any opinion out there as to whether this site would be better off as a group blog, rather than mostly me? It's not a trick question, and I won't be offended unless you suggest I be replaced by Dan Riehl...