For some months I have been trying to get my blog’s search-engine pagerank to recover after having moved it from WordPress-hosting to a Bitbucket static site (see 1, 2, 3, 4). I began restoring tags to my posts about six weeks ago, and I think I see a little improvement.
It’s hard to be sure because Google search for a given query returns very different results depending on which browser I use, which Gmail account (if any) I’m logged into, and whether I query it via third-party tools such as StartPage. Another confounding factor is that some kind people have begun occasionally taking links to my screeds and posting them on aggregator sites, so the page-view numbers are now quite different from what they were in my WordPress instantiation, and that means that the component of pagerank calculation that depends on links from aggregator sites is probably increasing. I’m pleased that I finally got a (mildly) critical comment on an old blog post as the result of being plugged this way — I’ve written about the frustration I experience in the scholarly side of my life, where the comforting chill of isolation has the unpleasant side effect that everyone I know is trying to warm me with their affectionate breaths.
I’m aware of two further steps I can take that should affect pagerank:
- to turn on something that increases “page value” — briefly, ads — something I feel uneasy about doing;
- replacing the long list of all past blog posts that currently fills the bottom of every article-page.
I do like a really full list of posts! But I can see that the effect for a search engine is that every title is repeated so often that the actual post with a given title is easily lost. I suppose I’m going to have to do with tags what other people do.
Oh, but I detest peer pressure… Even when it is probably all my own imagination…
Here’s what Google reports my highest “pageview” numbers to be right now:
Google Analytics statistics for Bitbucket blog
Thank you, unknown benefactor(s). I am not going to look up who you are; please accept my sincere gratitude but understand that I am allowing you to have made anonymous charity, said by some to be a good deed far exceeding all other forms of kindness.
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