Grading My Site
I did a makeover of my website today using a SEO tool called website grader. Here are the facts as of today and my comments:
WebSite Grade For www.mymallandnews.com : 63/100 (October 06, 2007)A website grade of 63 for www.mymallandnews.com means that of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 63% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over a dozen different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.
Not bad for an amateur site.
Google PageRank : 4
"Google PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important."
-From Google
The page rank doesn't seem to be stable. It seems to bounce between three and five. Somewhat mediocre. However, the term my mall is invariably the first line of the first page in Google searches.
Title : My Mall & News
Description : Portal for News, Commentary, and Shopping
Meta Keywords : my mall, mall, shopping, news, politics, opinion, commentary
By adding a meta description and keywords and also HTML headers (i.e. H1, H2, etc.), my ranking jumped about thirty percentage points. Although Google may not regard these meta words as significant, other search tools may.
Domain Expires Within A Year
The domain for this website is set to expire in less than a year (106 days). We would suggest renewing this domain with your registrar. Google and other search engines may penalize websites with domains that are set to expire soon. The reason for this is that many spam sites are often registered for short periods of time. Most registrars support paying upfront for several years and the cost is usually only about $10-$20 per year, so it is generally worth it.
Perhaps so. But this is done automatically about two weeks prior to expiration. I don't see much need to address this point.
Permanent Redirect Not Found
Search engines often regard www.mymallandnews.com and mymallandnews.com as two different websites unless you take specific measures to signal to them that they are the same site. The best way to handle this situation is to setup what is known as a permanent redirect (or a "301" redirect) from one of these sites to the other. This way, any links that are pointing to the secondary site benefit the primary site, from an SEO perspective. We could not detect a permanent redirect for this site, so it may be experiencing the negative effects of link fragmentation (some of the inbound links may point to www.mymallandnews.com and others to mymallandnews.com) For example, www.mymallandnews.com seems to have 556 inbound links whereas mymallandnews.com has 1,252 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.
Another red-flagged item that confused me. I built a .htaccess file like this that seems to work, but the error still appears in the report:
redirect 301 /mymallandnews.bizland.com http://www.mymallandnews.com
redirect 301 /mymallandnews.com http://www.mymallandnews.com
Google Indexed Pages : 614
Measures the approximate number of pages on http://www.mymallandnews.com/ that have been stored in the Google index. The Google web crawler will visit the website periodically and look for new content and store it in its index. Generally, the more pages a website has within the Google cache, the better.
There are 0 pages from http://www.mymallandnews.com/ in the supplemental results area of Google. These pages will generally not rank on Google.com. A high number of supplemental pages may indicate a problem with the site.
Inbound Links
One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites are linking to it. The more links the better.
Links Summary
Google : 10
Yahoo: 556
Not bad, I suppose, for a hobby site.
Technorati Ranking : 876,360
Technorati is a popular website ranking service. It measures the popularity of a given website as compared to all other sites that have been submitted to its system. This website currently has a Technorati ranking of 876,360.
del.icio.us bookmarks : 0
del.icio.us is a web-based bookmarking site. Delicious users save their bookmarks on the website so they can access them from any browser. A website that has many users bookmarking it is generally popular and will get more traffic. http://www.mymallandnews.com/ has about 0 bookmarks stored.
digg.com Submission Summary
The website www.mymallandnews.com has had 0 articles submitted to digg.com. These articles received a total of 0 diggs (votes) and 0 of these articles made it to the front page of digg.com.
None of this surprises me, as I didn't know anything about these sites before today. I expect that these numbers will improve within the next few months.
Readability Level : 9th Grade
This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.
This both surprises and pleases me. It surprises me because I dive into on occasion some difficult topics that of necessity uses advanced concepts. It pleases me because my goal above all is to communicate hard subejct as clearly as possible to the broadest possible audience. The ninth grade (one grade higher than my oldest boy) is a good target audience. I've always seen myself much more of a journalist than an academician.
The biggest change I made was to make the blog the splash page as I noticed that it was getting so many hits because it is dynamic. I've thought about getting a RSS feed, and perhaps I will do so in the future. But for now I think the collection of links that cover the range of ideology and the scope of the world works best for this site. The mall side continues to be anemic, although I continue to make money from Google.
So there you have it -- My Mall & News in its most recent incarnation. Perhaps some of the lessons I've learned can be helpful to you as you develop your blog or site.
WebSite Grade For www.mymallandnews.com : 63/100 (October 06, 2007)A website grade of 63 for www.mymallandnews.com means that of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 63% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over a dozen different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.
Not bad for an amateur site.
Google PageRank : 4
"Google PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important."
-From Google
The page rank doesn't seem to be stable. It seems to bounce between three and five. Somewhat mediocre. However, the term my mall is invariably the first line of the first page in Google searches.
Title : My Mall & News
Description : Portal for News, Commentary, and Shopping
Meta Keywords : my mall, mall, shopping, news, politics, opinion, commentary
By adding a meta description and keywords and also HTML headers (i.e. H1, H2, etc.), my ranking jumped about thirty percentage points. Although Google may not regard these meta words as significant, other search tools may.
Domain Expires Within A Year
The domain for this website is set to expire in less than a year (106 days). We would suggest renewing this domain with your registrar. Google and other search engines may penalize websites with domains that are set to expire soon. The reason for this is that many spam sites are often registered for short periods of time. Most registrars support paying upfront for several years and the cost is usually only about $10-$20 per year, so it is generally worth it.
Perhaps so. But this is done automatically about two weeks prior to expiration. I don't see much need to address this point.
Permanent Redirect Not Found
Search engines often regard www.mymallandnews.com and mymallandnews.com as two different websites unless you take specific measures to signal to them that they are the same site. The best way to handle this situation is to setup what is known as a permanent redirect (or a "301" redirect) from one of these sites to the other. This way, any links that are pointing to the secondary site benefit the primary site, from an SEO perspective. We could not detect a permanent redirect for this site, so it may be experiencing the negative effects of link fragmentation (some of the inbound links may point to www.mymallandnews.com and others to mymallandnews.com) For example, www.mymallandnews.com seems to have 556 inbound links whereas mymallandnews.com has 1,252 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.
Another red-flagged item that confused me. I built a .htaccess file like this that seems to work, but the error still appears in the report:
redirect 301 /mymallandnews.bizland.com http://www.mymallandnews.com
redirect 301 /mymallandnews.com http://www.mymallandnews.com
Google Indexed Pages : 614
Measures the approximate number of pages on http://www.mymallandnews.com/ that have been stored in the Google index. The Google web crawler will visit the website periodically and look for new content and store it in its index. Generally, the more pages a website has within the Google cache, the better.
There are 0 pages from http://www.mymallandnews.com/ in the supplemental results area of Google. These pages will generally not rank on Google.com. A high number of supplemental pages may indicate a problem with the site.
Inbound Links
One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites are linking to it. The more links the better.
Links Summary
Google : 10
Yahoo: 556
Not bad, I suppose, for a hobby site.
Technorati Ranking : 876,360
Technorati is a popular website ranking service. It measures the popularity of a given website as compared to all other sites that have been submitted to its system. This website currently has a Technorati ranking of 876,360.
del.icio.us bookmarks : 0
del.icio.us is a web-based bookmarking site. Delicious users save their bookmarks on the website so they can access them from any browser. A website that has many users bookmarking it is generally popular and will get more traffic. http://www.mymallandnews.com/ has about 0 bookmarks stored.
digg.com Submission Summary
The website www.mymallandnews.com has had 0 articles submitted to digg.com. These articles received a total of 0 diggs (votes) and 0 of these articles made it to the front page of digg.com.
None of this surprises me, as I didn't know anything about these sites before today. I expect that these numbers will improve within the next few months.
Readability Level : 9th Grade
This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.
This both surprises and pleases me. It surprises me because I dive into on occasion some difficult topics that of necessity uses advanced concepts. It pleases me because my goal above all is to communicate hard subejct as clearly as possible to the broadest possible audience. The ninth grade (one grade higher than my oldest boy) is a good target audience. I've always seen myself much more of a journalist than an academician.
The biggest change I made was to make the blog the splash page as I noticed that it was getting so many hits because it is dynamic. I've thought about getting a RSS feed, and perhaps I will do so in the future. But for now I think the collection of links that cover the range of ideology and the scope of the world works best for this site. The mall side continues to be anemic, although I continue to make money from Google.
So there you have it -- My Mall & News in its most recent incarnation. Perhaps some of the lessons I've learned can be helpful to you as you develop your blog or site.
Labels: blogging
posted by My Mall and News at
11:36 PM
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