How To Smash Through Googles Glass Ceiling
Last week there was some SEO discussion about a perceived Glass Ceiling effect in Google. The symptoms of which are totally flat traffic from Google over a long period.
We covered breaking through traffic barriers back in 2007 but the focus of that article was a general increase in traffic rather than specifically increasing Google traffic.
We see websites on a regular basis that are flat-lining with no perceivable traffic increase for months or even years and our approach is always the same.
- Step 1: Expand
- Step 2: Promote
Expansion
Most sites which have plateaued can gain additional traffic by creating a lot more content. All things being equal a blog with 10,000 posts will get a lot more traffic than a blog with 1,000 posts.
The simple reason for this is that a web-page normally ranks for 2 or 3 keywords & phrases in its title tag. The more pages you have the more keywords you can potentially rank for.
Methods of expansion include directories, news articles, blog posts and even the simple task of adding more products or services to your inventory.
With a little imagination any website can be expanded to rank for whole new sets of keywords.
Promotion
Adding thousands or hundreds of thousands of new pages to a website isn’t going to help unless the increase in pages is matched by an appropriate increase in TrustRank and PageRank.
In simple terms you need to increase the quality of links you can attract and move your site a few notches up the Trust scale.
Read: TrustRank: How to Get In The Google TrustBox
Post category: Search Engine Optimisation Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 4 comments below, or add your own!
“Adding thousands or hundreds of thousands of new pages to a website isn’t going to help unless the increase in pages is matched by an appropriate increase in TrustRank and PageRank.”
Not true.
Thanks Josh. Care to share a bit more information?
I will be the first to agree that not all cases are the same but when you have a finite amount of PageRank to spread around your site adding new pages will always cause dilution of that PR.
i think that TrustRank are the most important to promote your site, google pr are not making to much diffracts by promoting web sites.
I agree with what you are saying Patrick although for me it seems to be a series of glass ceilings one after the other that take several months to break through each. What I see is traffic rise to a certain level and stay there for sometimes months on end. Then a huge site will link followed by a ton of smaller sites linking and then a few weeks later traffic jumps up to a new level and then stays there for another few months. The process repeats like that and has for the last 2.5 years of my site being created.
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