Blogrolls, PageRank, and Comments Oh My!
Posted by 0rion on September 17th, 2009 - 8:06 pm
First, I should clarify that I have nothing against Pete Zaitcev; I like him and the stuff he writes. I just can never resist the opportunity to heckle him about his backwater “no comments” policy, especially when his excuse for not allowing them seems to be “well it’s just too much work”.
Of course it’s just my personal preference and I can’t reasonably force that on him, but I find it incredibly frustrating when I can’t just leave a comment on someone’s post to provide feedback. It also eliminates the interesting group conversation that helps enrich a good post and fosters online community.
This issue has already been beat to death, and I very much doubt that Zaitcev will change his ways, so I suppose I’ll have to content myself instead with gnashing my teeth in frustration and hassling him at every opportunity.
OK, so about Google PageRank. In my previous post I mentioned that one reason I removed my normal blogroll was because it’s damaging to the site’s ranking.
Pete responded to my comment with the following:
“UPDATE: Blogrolls do not “damage” PageRank. For one thing it’s impossible to “hemorrage” to begin with. We know that Google applies certain modifiers to the calculated PageRank postfactum, and some of them discourage link farms. However, there are also ad-hoc modifiers for dealing with blogs.”
I don’t know on what basis he is so confident of this opinion that it is “impossible”. Google is naturally very secretive about how their algorithms for searching, sort, and ranking actually work, so of course we can’t know for certain the exact mechanisms that are work here.
There are a couple key things we know, however, that I believe support my conclusions about the PageRank system:
1. PageRank across the internet is a zero sum game at its core. For one site’s PageRank to rise, it necessarily comes at the expense of another.
2. Although no one knows for certain the inner workings of Google’s indexing and ranking algorithms, we do at least know for a fact that the system worked this way in the past. Obviously they have made significant changes over the years, but I don’t see how this could be fundamentally different given #1. They also have received several related patents that seem to indicate this is still a part of how the system works today.
The bottom line: is it harmful to your site to have a traditional blogroll? Truthfully, it’s probably not that big of a deal, especially given the small scale of the traffic on most anime blogs. This is especially the case if Pete’s claim that Google modifies its weighting specifically for blogs is true.
However, to say that it has no detrimental effect to your rank at all is, I believe, pretty obviously false. By the very zero sum nature of the system, outgoing links will always have the effect of giving away some of your “link juice”. It may be negligible, especially considering the way links are weighted based on the relevance of the site that’s being linked to, and the relative ranks between the sites.
But the fact remains that it always by nature has at least some minor negative effect. A few links here and there is nothing, but when you’ve got 50 or more outbound links on every single page of your entire website, the effect can add up. Even more so when many of the sites have a much lower rank than your own, or (if you’re lazy and don’t update your blogroll) are simply dead links.
There’s also evidence that if the majority of the links pointing to your site from others are “site-wide” links, as is the case with traditional blogrolls, it can actually be detrimental to your rank. This would seem to indicate that new bloggers who go around trying to get listed on the blogroll of every site they can find are actually hurting their own cause.
Again, there isn’t a way to prove all this Q.E.D., unless you happen to be in the personal confidence of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, but there’s a significant amount of evidence supporting these ideas. Honestly, I was a bit surprised at Pete’s reaction, since in my experience in the industry this understanding of PageRank and linking in SEO is very common.
If I’m completely misinformed, and this is “bogus” as Pete claims, I certainly welcome him or other informed readers to correct me. I don’t believe that to be the case, of course.
In any case, either way I’m much happier with my new blogroll, as I feel it better helps highlight my favorite related blogs while also giving readers more information about the sites I recommend.
Having a link without the “nofollow” attribute on your main page or every page is like an endorsement of good sites with similar content. Google won’t penalize you or rank you lower because you have links (since they’re a natural part of the net and surely they’re aware of the existence of blogs). I don’t get where link farming comes into this since link farm links are generally spam and automatically generated.
Sounds like you’re trying to rationalize not wanting your readers to visit other blogs while the come from other blogs to yours.
Of course you could have a blogroll with a “nofollow” attribute, but it would be good etiquette to state clearly that those links don’t pass page rank (not that page rank is all that important). By default links in the commenter’s name have this.
I don’t know where you got the idea that I somehow am “trying to rationalize not wanting [my] readers to visit other blogs”, seeing as how, ya know, I just dedicated an entire post to many of the great blogs out there that I like reading. I rather resent that insinuation, to be honest.
As for the whole nofollow attribute, there’s mixed opinions and a lot of debate regarding how exactly Google actually treats those and whether or not they affect your PageRank, which is why I skipped over that aspect of the whole issue.
Because eventually that single post will fade away behind many others.
Sigh.
In case you hadn’t noticed… well, obviously you hadn’t, but it’s permanently placed in my top menu for exactly that reason.
Thanks for derailing the point of this whole post and making broad assumptions about my character in your very first comment on my site, though.
You’re welcome.
I was going to say “Schooled.”, but it appears that a
Double schooled.
is in order. /golfclap
This is the part where I look up above at where I wrote about turning off comments:
And then I look at the comments above, and I can’t help but laugh at the cruel irony.
At least I was able to provide Owen with some extra entertainment today.
I for one applaud the whole initiative.
A ‘classic’ blogroll is completely meaningless. It’s a ‘hit and miss’ kind of thing. I browsed through it a couple of times and was pleasantly surprised a couple of times (for example when I was introduced to Cruel Angels Theses – I loved the Darker Than Black commentaries) but mostly I was just like “Wah :’( another 10 minutes wasted”. In the end you just end up exchanging links with every single blogger as if it were your digital businesscard. You get a massive list of sites (of sometimes questionable quality / vividness) and end up wasting the time of the visitor who was expecting to read some quality stuff with the ‘epic win seal of approval’.
And I agree about your comment towards Mr. Zaitcevs site as well. A blog is there to share witty stuff and pitch ideas. Few things are more annoying than not being able to give your own opinion on a subject or share your own musings which were ignited by an entry. A comment is not always ‘bland feedback’. Sometimes it’s a valuable addition to the original post or a personal touch…there for the enjoyment of the reader.
I recall some parts of Pagerank being made public…we had to analyse it as a test case in some lineair algebra class lol…though they probably released the info solely because it got changed lol. Either way, you can’t go wrong with deleting the old blogroll. And in the end the new way is better for the visitors and that’s all that matters.
Ah hah, an actual “real” comment!
Well, it is nice to see some people share my frustrations with the standard blogroll. I can especially empathize with the “sites of questionable quality” issue that plagues many blogrolls and prevents them from really being useful at directing visitors to the best content.
And in regard to issue about allowing comments, as you can see from this post providing readers with that privilege comes with pros and cons, certainly. There’s also inevitably some anti-spam maintenance work that has to be done, as well. In the end, though, I believe the informative and insightful comments that so frequently add value and additional perspectives to a post are more than worth any potential downsides.
This is especially true with a relatively small and close-knit blogging subculture such as anime fans / Japanophiles.
Whew, this is heavy reading. But quite enlightening. Makes me almost want to rethink the traditional approach I’ve been using thus far. And I agree about Ani-Nouto, though the inability to comment also seems to add to its mystique, wouldn’t you say?
Reminds me that I need to edit my blogroll a bit to keep it updated. I’ll still be keeping it where it is though, to my (possible) detriment.
I’ll bite …
I really don’t have any comments on whether having an ordinary blog roll would hurt PageRanking since I’m pretty sure I have zero link-backs to my page sadly enough LOL. Ultimately in the end I don’t think it has any negative impact at all.
I hit PR3 in roughly 4-6 months of starting my blog or whatever and I’ve been there ever since I quit blogging a year ago (my database had been wiped with no backup). I’ve recently came back.
Anyways .. back to my main point … when I came back … and knowing I had been removed from Random Curiosity’s blog roll due to inactivity (RC brought in a multitude of visitors) I had to rely on Google searches.
The only thing I cared about was hitting the FIRST PAGE on Google on every single one of my Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 posts since that’s the only relevant show I was blogging since everything else was either overblogged or sucked way too hard. Tokyo Magnitude wasn’t either, very very under the radar when the first episode hit … not so much now =). Hitting first page was VERY important since it was the only real source of visitors outside of animenano/ABantenna.
Random info: My visitor source is 40% Google, 40% AN/AB, 20% direct.
And by golly I pretty much met that goal … most of the time … The moment I hit the Publish button I went onto to the good ole Google five minutes later and typed in “Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 XX) XX being whatever episode for the week.
Crossing my fingers I saw my silly post somewhere within the top 5 of the first page most of the time. My ep 10 post is somewhere in a dark void LOL.
Do it right now. Do a search on “Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 11″ If I’m not on the first page … well then … fuck you Google =). I don’t really care if I drop off within 1 week, as searches usually matter during the week anyways …
BTW: I hate how it ranks it differently if you do for example “9″ or “09″
What’s the moral of this silly unorganized unedited mini story of mine? Well it’s that SEO > PageRanking. As long as I can hit First Page ranking on the show(s) I”m blogging, I’m one happy camper since I know there are many more sites (read: bigger more cooler anime blogs) that destroy me on PageRanking that aren’t even listed.
Yes I did beat sites in pagelisting with a PR of 0.
That’s because content is most important with Google. Page rank is meaningless without it and many bloggers haven’t figured that out yet. So they think tricks and cheats are the best way to go.
Did she get naked?
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