<Oil Price Poll Redux The Oil Drum DrumBeat: July 30, 2006>

115 comments on Riddle Me This, Batman...

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Rick on July 30, 2006 - 12:13am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
More links are always good--but I'd bet search engine placement is better. Here's what people are Googling: Orange= "oil price," Green = "peak oil," Blue = "oil shortage," Red = "oil depletion."

TOD ranks well on Google for "peak oil"--#8 in my search, lower part of page 1. Issue: "peak oil" is still a bit of a term for the cognoscenti--the people who know the language can find us easily, and those who don't can't.

We are outside of the top 60 on the other search terms, including the most common, "oil price." (And that is probably the hardest term to rank well on.) Note, on the bottom graph, that there is huge news volume on oil prices, and very little on the depletion issues that are causing the high prices.

My suggestion: let's find a way to tie TOD to oil price references.

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fleam on July 30, 2006 - 12:17am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Oil Price Drum?
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cyclelicious on July 30, 2006 - 1:59am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
True enough that TOD appears on the first page of Google results for "peak oil," but remember that about 40% of search users click on the first search result returned, 8% click on the second, and it's downhill from there.

8000+ visitors per day is a good number. I imagine you have a very high percentage of return visitors, which is bad for PPC revenue; I hope you make enough to pay for the bandwidth anyway.

The TTLB Top 100 tend to be either highly partisan political blogs or blogs with very high technology/geek/nerd content. #155 for a niche topic like energy policy is excellent. My blog -- which is about bicycles -- has been linked to by a couple of the top 100 only when I deliberately create link bait, and it's always on something technology or blog-geek related. If you get mentioned on Boing Boing, BTW, you'll instantly get linked to from at least a dozen other blogs. But I digress -- TOD will only make BoingBoing if you demonstrate a pie-in-the-sky way to harvest fat from people to make biofuel.

Vulgar language doesn't seem to be a factor in a blog's popularity; and in fact many of the top blogs are very heavy in it. And I'm amused by those who advocate free speech and then immediately pounce on those who object to language.

Back to TOD's number 8 ranking on Google -- something is wrong because in spite of 2500 backlinks to the home page and nearly 200,000 thousands links altogether into TOD, you only have a Google PageRank of 2. I think you can improve your placement on Google with some effort. Yahoo has your old blogspot site on page four of results. On MSN you're at the top of page two. If you want to work on SEO, you'll need to make decisions about what search phrases you want to rank for.

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Rick on July 30, 2006 - 2:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
If you want to work on SEO, you'll need to make decisions about what search phrases you want to rank for.
Exactly. We're good on the specialist phrase, but not on the general one.  

Good suggestions. FYI, we have referred to another site explaining how to harvest fat from people to make biofuel. Nobody cared, probably because it was a thin guy. http://www.earthrace.net/view.asp?webpage=1228

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Prof. Goose on July 30, 2006 - 1:00pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
yep, page rank is tied to the large number of links on our front page.  Page rank is basically a ratio of links in to links out, and we have a very big denominator.
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Prof. Goose on July 30, 2006 - 3:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
also cyc, we did get boing'ed and farked a couple of times during the hurricanes, and who can forget HO's first huge post that got us on the map with the picture of a depleted/water cut oil field, which I cannot seem to find at the moment (anyone remember where that link is or what it was called?)

by the way, RR, here's one of my posts on the gas tax:

http://www.theoildrum.com/classic/2005/08/repost-gas-tax-increases-revisited.html

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Prof. Goose on July 30, 2006 - 3:45pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
here's that HO post that got farked and boing'ed:

http://www.theoildrum.com/classic/2005/06/picture-of-depletion.html

still applicable, much like many of HO and Stuart's posts.  :)

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Mike Hearn on July 31, 2006 - 11:17am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
My suggestion: let's find a way to tie TOD to oil price references.

AdWords

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115 comments on Riddle Me This, Batman...

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