Dan, KB6NU, often claims that he has the #1 ham radio blog because it tops the Google search results for "ham radio blog". Today he posted a review of the top ham radio blogs according to Google. I was disappointed to find that mine wasn't even mentioned.
I ran the search myself and found that Dan's blog came third, while G4ILO's Shack came right after it. I guess Dan didn't mention it because the result wasn't a blog. Curiously, my actual blog doesn't appear as a search result in its own right at all, at least I hadn't seen it by the time I got bored paging through the results. Google moves in mysterious ways. I wish I understood it, especially as my entire living depends on the fact that I own a website that ranks #1 for several quite profitable key phrases. The fact that this is completely out of my control gives me sleepless nights sometimes.
While I was trying various searches to see if my blog appeared I stumbled across a site called Biznut, which values G4ILO's Shack at £23,517.27 - considerably more than the value of the contents of my actual shack! I don't know how Biznut comes to that conclusion, but if anyone wants to pay me that they are welcome to the site. I'll even knock off the £17.27!
Welcome home Julian! I enjoyed your holiday write-up on your other blog.
ReplyDeleteGoogle does a nice job of finding Web sites by title and content. Dan's Weblog appears high in its rankings because the name of his blog includes "ham radio blog" in its title. He's also been cranking out content for a lot of years giving him deep links and plenty of Google juice.
But as he pointed out, that has little to do with the quality of content or with size of audience.
I've found compete.com to be a fairly good indicator of traffic and according to it, your blog easily surpasses Dan's in traffic.
It's painless to republish content found in mailing lists, ARRL bulletins, and Google news searches.
Actually crafting well thought out opinions that tend to shape the overall discussion is a much better metric for determining the "best" blogs and without question your ranking is sky high when it comes to depth of content.
Keep blogging!
73 de Jeff, KE9V
From the blog post:
ReplyDelete"I’m kind of surprised that some of the blogs that made this list were relatively inactive, but I guess that it would be difficult for Google to automatically figure that out."
That pretty much blows the basis for the ratings out of the water.
If you want to know what's a good blog, look in people's blogrolls.
73
Goody
K3NG
Strange when I run that same query I come out on top. Maybe that is because that it is the way that Google cookies work or something. If I use my IE instead of Firefox Julian's blog comes out top, probably because I never use IE normally.
ReplyDelete