The page ranks on my site have been “inverted” for quite a while and only just now have they begun to shift towards what’s more normal.

Inverted Page Rank? What’s an Inverted Page Rank?

A normal web site usually has page rank concentrated on the home page, followed by the main category pages, and finally the normal content pages. So your site may have a page rank of 4 on the home page, 3 on each of the category pages, and from 2 to 0 on content pages.

DiamondLime.com had (what I consider) a rare case of page rank distribution—it was almost totally inverted from the normal hierarchy in the paragraph above. The home page had a page rank of 2, category pages had a page rank of 3, articles had page ranks anywhere from 4 to 0, and the site map had a page rank of 5!

How Did My Page Rank Get Turned Upside Down?

I’m not entirely sure how my page rank got to be so strange, but here are a few of my theories:

• Heavy Deep Linking

  My site has been linked to in an unordinary fashion—I have a few pages and blog posts that are far more popular and linked to than most of my main pages. More people link to my post on ChaCha, The BYU Blog and Web Site Directory, or The Lime Blog than the home page. All these links’ page rank is getting poured into my site further down in my navigation hierarchy.

• Page Rank Bleeding

  One page that should have had a high page rank and didn’t was my blog. I think that this is because there were many links on my blog page to other sites that were bleeding page rank like mad.

• Links Per Page

  The Lime Blog and the home page of DiamondLime.com both had many, many links to other pages, effectively distributing all of their page rank away from themselves.

How Can I Un-Invert Page Ranks?

I did a few things that have helped even my page rank out. To fix the deep linking that was turning my page rank upside down, I tried (within reason) to make sure those pages that were heavily linked to also linked to many other pages to spread their page rank around. I changed how my page rank bleeding happened by reducing the number of off-site links that were on main pages and shifting these links to a links page (I still want to link to my friends and to valuable resources, so I couldn’t just remove them. Moving these links helped make things more organized, too). Finally, I added a few links to emphasize pages that I wanted to give higher page rank to.

These efforts seem to have worked—instead of ranging from 0 to 5, my page ranks recently became 4 for all the main pages except the main page of my blog and 3 for most everything else. The lesson is that you can influence how your “Google Juice” or page rank is shared around, even if the bottle is upside down and making a sticky mess.

After the famous Million Dollar Home Page, lots of people have tried to come up with similar linking schemes to earn money and/or fame. Many of them are pathetic. Others are somewhat ingenious or even downright clever methods of free traffic generation.

One of the more creative linking ideas is from Tag A Cloud. No money changes hands—only links. Each visitor is allowed to sign up for one or more tags. These tags are short text descriptions that are added to the overall tag hierarchy. For each click your tag gets, you get a point. For each visitor that comes from your site to Tag a Cloud, you get two points. The more points you accumulate, the larger your tag becomes relative to the other tags on Tag A Cloud. You win by increasing traffic to your site. Tag a Cloud wins by getting more traffic and huge inbound link power. What Tag a Cloud plans to do with all this Google Juice is yet to be seen.

So head on over to Tag a Cloud and see if you can’t get some good free traffic generation going. I’d appreciate a little click love below:

I was just browsing the November ‘06 CSS Reboot screenshots to see if I could pick up some cool new site design ideas or spot someone I know. I came upon a site that had done a pretty good new design for its reboot, only the site didn’t have a screenshot for the earlier design. I was really curious to see what the earlier site looked like because the site owner said the new design was 100 times better than the old design. I wanted to see “100 times better than what?” So how do I get a glimpse of what the site looked like earlier?

Enter The Wayback Machine.

Periodic Site Snapshots

The Wayback Machine is run by web.archive.org as a free public service. The Wayback Machine has a crawler (actually, probably several) that goes out on the web and takes “snapshots” of web sites which it stores in its archive. The crawlers typically visit several times a month so that the archive is updated (hopefully) with each important web site change. All of these snapshots are available for curious visitors to browse through and laugh at bad old designs or get all sentimental about earlier, sometimes better, versions of web sites.

The Wayback Machine has records from as early as 1996, so it’s very easy to see the earlier site designs of just about everything—the vast majority of web sites have come online after 1996. There are even a few entries of DiamondLime.com, although the snapshots kind of got a little bit hacked, and for some reason the crawlers stopped taking new shots after May of 2006. It’s especially fun to pick a big web site that has been around for a long time, like Yahoo or Apple.

Because the information is sometimes a little patchy, and because The Wayback Machine stores snapshots instead of full web sites, it’s mostly an interesting visual/design tool—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun or useful. For example, I came away with a deep feeling of appreciation for how far web design has come after looking at a few sites from 1996!

I think that most people are more motivated to finish their goals if those goals are made public and are based on financial costs that have already been incurred—I don’t want to look foolish and I don’t want my money to go to waste. Understanding that many people, including me, operate this way, I am going to make some of my goals for DiamondLime public.

Interestingly enough, this may be the first time I have formally gone through the process of setting goals for DiamondLime. I have written many to-do lists for DiamondLime, but those lists contained mostly simple, fix-it kind of items and were designed to keep my site from being embarrassing and broken. It’s now time to establish this site’s direction and objectives more concretely (whether or not I have succeeded in making the site unembarrassing and functional!).

DiamondLime Goals for 2007

1. Pay for Itself

   This is the big goal for the year—I would like DiamondLime to generate enough affiliate/ad revenue to pay for the costs of hosting the site.

2. Write an Internet Marketing Ebook

   The whole purpose of DiamondLime is to help me and others learn and share more about Internet marketing, web design, and business. I think preparing an ebook about marketing on the Web would help me to make solid, quantifiable progress in this direction. However, this ebook doesn’t need to be 600 pages long, wax your car, and cook dinner. My goal is to write 50 pages of solid content, or one page a week.

3. Write a Web Design Ebook

   Again, I’m going to shoot for a modest ebook here—about 50 pages, or one a week.

4. Get 15,000 Visitors

   This works out to an average of 1,250 visitors a month. I currently get approximately 600 a month, so this will be quite a stretch - I will need to triple my traffic by the end of the year to reach this goal.

5. Update the BYU Blog and Web Site Directory

   Many of the listings in the directory are out of date—I’m pretty sure many of the students have graduated—and it’s time to add some new listings. I will set a modest goal of adding 20 listings this year.

So those are my goals for DiamondLime this year. I feel like I am going to have to stretch to reach these goals, but that’s what goals are for—to compel and aid us in achieving greater things than we normally would otherwise. Hopefully DiamondLime will become more than it would have without these goals.