Speedy site indexing and PageRank

In response to my previous posting about my AdSense case study, reader Miha pointed out that my Invisible Fence Guide showed up quickly in the search engine indexes because it was a subdomain of a “well respected site” (referring to EricGiguere.com, my personal site) that ranks well in the search engines.

(Quick explanation of what a subdomain is: given a domain name like “a.b.c.d.com”, “a” is a subdomain of “b.c.d.com”, “b” is a subdomain of “c.d.com”, “c” is a subdomain of “d.com” and “d” is a subdomain of “com”. Get it? The subdomain is the part of the name immediately to the left of a period.)

While it's true that EricGiguere.com ranks well, I don't think the Invisible Fence Guide gets its good rankings from the subdomain itself. Yes, the EricGiguere.com home page has a PageRank of 6 out of 10, but there was no link from any page on EricGiguere.com to the Invisible Fence Guide until earlier this week.

What I had done, though, was link to it from this blog. And there's the key. A regularly-updated blog is the easiest way to get new material — including links — into the search engines. Once the search engines figure out that a blog exists — and here you need to spend a bit of time at the beginning registering your blog with as many blog searching and updating services as possible — then they send out their crawlers frequently in order to check for new content.

What about PageRank? Remember that PageRank is a page-specific measure, not a site-specific measure. The PR of pages on the same site are calculated independently. Normally, of course, the pages on the same site link to each other and share their PageRank that way. But you could do the same with pages on different sites. Or subdomains.

For example, compare the PageRank of my father's blog (no PR) versus that of one of my readers (PR 4). Both are hosted by Blogger on the blogspot.com domain. Surely blogspot.com as a whole would have a high PR if PR was calculated on a site basis. But it's not, it's on a page basis. My father's blog will gain PR over time, of course, but for now it doesn't have any.

But PageRank is just one factor in Google's ranking algorithm. You can get a page ranked #1 for a search term irrespective of its PR, as I've shown with the Invisible Fence Guide. What matters most initially is getting your new site indexed, and it seems that a blog is the easiest way to do it initially. (Of course, once you've established a site with good PR, you'd be wise to use it to boost the PR of your other sites, which is exactly what I did with MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com.)

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

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