Memes?

[Dorothy Thompson]

I have made a startling discovery and I just found this out yesterday. My reviewing blog, As the Pages Turn, received a 5 PR ranking. This is a blog I only started a month ago and I only have maybe ten posts up. This goes against all the SEO I've ever learned. When I look for a blog to host my authors, I insist that the blog is updated, has a good set of archives and is geared toward my authors' books. I've now made a new rule where the blogs have to have a good PR ranking - at least a 4. It takes a while for a new blog to get even a 4, but with constant updating, it can get there in a month (give or take a few days). Mine is a 5 which I discovered yesterday. It goes against everything I thought SEO to be and after doing some analyzing, I thought could it be the memes?

I have found 4 memes which I use - The Sunday Salon, Booking Through Thursday, Teaser Tuesdays and What's on Your Nightstand?. I love them and am having a blast using them when I can find the time, but does anyone know of anymore out there geared toward books? I need a Monday, Wednesday and a Friday, or anything else you can think of.

If memes are the ticket to high PR ranking, then I am so there so if anyone has any suggestions, can you please let me know?

Thank you!

[Amy]

There's mailbox Monday and Friday Finds....I don't know anything about SEO!

[Dorothy Thompson]

Thanks, Amy! BTW, yours is a 4 which is tres bien! Hey, what's the link to the Monday and Friday Finds?

[Bermudaonion]

What does SEO stand for and how do you find out what your is?

[Tricia]

SEO is search engine optimization and PR is PageRank. PageRank is a Google product that uses an algorithm to determine a site's "importance" or popularity based on hyperlinks. You can actually inflate your PR by purchasing backlinks. Mostly, it is just for fun. Per Wikipedia: In practice, the PageRank concept has proven to be vulnerable to manipulation, and extensive research has been devoted to identifying falsely inflated PageRank and ways to ignore links from documents with falsely inflated PageRank.

You can use this website to find yours. (You are a 4 Bermudaonion. :) )

[Bermudaonion]

Thanks, Tricia!

[Anysia]

Huh. It tells me that my pagerank seems to be forged ... WTH?

I rarely do memes unless I think they will be helpful to book readers reading my blog not only now, but in the future (like when they are 3 months old). I do Teaser Tuesdays and my own, Word of Blog (Mondays) which hasn't really caught on, but if anyone wants to join me I'll put up a Mr. Linky.

[Anysia]

Now that I've read up on how page rank works, I don't see how memes can help. Most memes don't link to other blogs, except the one that sets up the meme (so only that blog gets the pagerank benefit). Participating bloggers don't benefit unless the main meme blog uses dofollow for their comments where people post their links.

Most links left in comments don't count for pagerank because most blogs mark links in comments as nofollow (so Google doesn't use them in calculating page rank).

Dorothy, can you explain how you think memes are affecting pagerank?

[Dorothy Thompson]

That's the only thing it has to be. The blog is a month old. I have maybe ten posts. I'm ranked like 4,000,000 in Alexa, not exactly impressive there. It's mind-boggling. I know that one of the memes puts your link on their blog and I was thinking it was coming from that, but when I checked out this particular blog's PR ranking, it was only a 4. It's mind-boggling. Go here... http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php and put in www.asthepagesturn.wordpress.com and it's a 5. I have blogs who are older, has more archives, almost 100 subscribers on one of them and coming up real well in google but only have a 4. Why would this one blog have a 5? Just doesn't make sense.

[Anysia]

Blogs that are hosted on Wordpress.COM benefit from being part of that network of sites because of the way they interlink, generate related posts from the all of the blogs on the site to append to other WP.com blog posts, etc. Are your other blogs hosted on WP.com?

[Callista]

I found this on wikipedia but I highly doubt you would ask the question if you were knowingly forging it so not sure why it says that:

False or spoofed PageRank
While the PageRank shown in the Toolbar is considered to be derived from an accurate PageRank value (at some time prior to the time of publication by Google) for most sites, it must be noted that this value is also easily manipulated. A current flaw is that any low PageRank page that is redirected, via a 302 server header or a "Refresh" meta tag, to a high PageRank page causes the lower PageRank page to acquire the PageRank of the destination page. In theory a new, PR0 page with no incoming links can be redirected to the Google home page - which is a PR 10 - and by the next PageRank update the PR of the new page will be upgraded to a PR10. This spoofing technique, also known as 302 Google Jacking, is a known failing or bug in the system. Any page's PageRank can be spoofed to a higher or lower number of the webmaster's choice and only Google has access to the real PageRank of the page. Spoofing is generally detected by running a Google search for a URL with questionable PageRank, as the results will display the URL of an entirely different site (the one redirected to) in its results.

[Anysia]

The theme I use includes SEO, it's possible that it is doing something funny although I looked at the page source and nothing jumped out at me.

I disabled the SEO function last night and now I don't get any message about seemingly forged pagerank. The page rank is the same though and I don't think the SEO function was doing anything hinky, just something the PR checker doesn't understand or misinterprets.

[Mrs S]

I don't think memes can affect PR - as it's all about relevant and authoritative sites linking to your site - backlinks. Now if you were to create the meme then maybe - ie Dew's site gets a lot of backlinks for her Weekly Geeks and Readathons.

If anyone is interested in SEO for their blogs - to increase traffic by getting listed in google - then visit Search engine guide or SEObook.com.

Oh and stay well clear of 'black hat' techniques like buying links as Google will just black list you.

You can see what traffic is coming from search engines using google analytics or wordpress stats.