Monthly Archives: November 2015

Good Blogging Practices

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One of the things I have always done is to read and comment on blogs I find worthwhile. The main reason I do this is to learn. Another advantages include growing a network of like minded people (that grow from recognizing you commenting on their blog or blogs they read and then some start to read your blog…). And that growing your following can result in more links to your site and better search rankings.

These are my comments sparked by an post with some good ideas on some good blogging practices. They are edited and extended from the comment left on the blog.

Great thoughts.

Give your readers what they want: so important and yes to some extent people think of this, but that idea should get more attention from most bloggers.

Length of posts; as you say make them appropriate. Sometimes what you have to share is best captured in a long post. Sometimes a short post is best. Trying to jam a post into a specific format/length is a recipe for failure.

I do think the long, detailed posts are valuable and if you are never doing that there is likely some value in seeing if some of what you have to say can be expressed well in a long post.

I do have comments I leave spark me to write longer posts on my own blogs. I also started a management blog on blogspot (over 10 years ago) and when I created my own domain (also over 10 years ago) I left it there (urls should live forever).

A few years later I started to use that blog to republish comments I thought were worth keeping (one of the things I do is link to my previous content and trying to find some comment I want to reference is really hard, by collecting comments I think I might want to reference on that blog I can actually find them again). I often edit these a bit and add some links (which I often am prevented from including even when they would be really useful).

I was adding this to the related links that follow – Build Your Online Presence (another post that started as a comment). And this shows another reason to republish your comments that are worth keeping. The original article link is gone. I always include a link to the post I commented on; it is amazing how many are broken a few years later (lots of people break a basic web usability and wise SEO practice and break their urls).

An illustration of why it is in your interests to have urls live forever. Last year I did posts on my most popular posts on many of my blogs (based on views in 2014). A fairly typical example is from my Curious Cat Comments blog. The most popular posts by year 2014-6 (the most recent year does have an advantage as lots of regular readers read each new post); 2013-1; 2010-1; 2009-1; 2008-1; 2007-1; 2006-2. This one actually was more heavily weighted to recent post than most of my blogs. I just checked it for this year and 2 posts from 2007 and 1 post from 2008 that were not in the top last year are all in the top 6 this year (and the one from 2008 last year is also repeated again).

Related: Blog commenting options – Make Your Blog Welcoming – Don’t Use Short URL Services

Big Updates to Moz Index Results in Big Moves in Domain Authority and Page Authority Results

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Moz posted a big update to their index this week that had a big impact on Moz Page Authority and Domain Authority. Why does it matter?

Really it doesn’t matter, but since Google is so secretive the Moz data gives us some insight into what Google (and other search engines are likely seeing). The changes to Moz have no direct effect on search results or traffic. What Moz believes (and it makes sense they are right) is that the updates better match what Google (and the others) see.

Basically Moz found some weaknesses in their prior data and methods and have tried to improve them, as they explained here. Many sites are noticing lowing Page Authority and Domain Authority numbers for their site (as I am on mine). I am not clear yet, but it seems possible, their was a general inflation in the numbers and so say the average number might have declined by 20% (this is just a made up number for illustration purposes). If that were true what really matters is if you declined less (that would be good) or more (that would be bad) than 20%.

And of course, there will be lots of variation in the changes in scores. These scores move around a fair amount (though Domain Authority scores do seem fairly stable over time) even when no big changes are happening at Moz.

Comments on the fluctuations of DA and PA scores from Rand Fisken- DA/PA Fluctuations: How to Interpret, Apply, & Understand These ML-Based Scores

because Mozscape indices take 3-4 weeks to process, the data collected in an index is between ~21-90 days old.
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Since Domain and Page Authority are on a 100-page scale, the very top of that represents the most link-rich sites and pages, and nearly every index, it’s harder and harder to get these high scores and sites, on average, that aren’t growing their link profiles substantively will see PA/DA drops.
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PA/DA are created using a machine-learning algorithm whose training set is search results in Google. Over time, as Google gets pickier about which types of links it counts, and as Mozscape picks up on those changes, PA/DA scores will change to reflect it.
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My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question “Why did my PA/DA drop?!” is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it’s more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you’ve done

Rand provides lots of good insight here. Moz is generally followed closely by people that pay a great deal of attention to SEO. I am not really in that camp, I pay some attention just because I find it interesting. I don’t spend time trying to figure out how to increase SEO through various gimmicks.

I don’t pay much attention to ratings for other sites, based on his suggestion I might start tracking a few similar sites to see how their scores vary over time as a way of understanding my scores better. All I really did before was look at other sites authority scores and comparing when I was bored (maybe 2 or 3 times a year) but didn’t keep track of any of them.

I find Moz interesting because it gives us open access to interesting data. There are many other things that impact search results but the authority pages and sites have is an interesting thing to watch (and does have a real impact on search results – even if it is much less than people might suspect).

Earlier this year I wrote about Decreases in MozRank and Page Authority for some of my sites and I posted an update where most of the decreases had disappeared (the authority numbers had returned to the same or close to what they were before the decline). Hopefully that will happen for my sites this time too, but we will have to wait and see.

Related: Most Important Search Engine Ranking Factors – Find MozRank, Moz PageAuthority, Google PageRank and Alexa Results Now – Keeping Up with SEO Changes