Wordpress | Media Culpa

How I increased ranking and traffic with Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a great free tool provided by Google to help businesses optimize their sites for search. You can use it to understand how your blog or website performs in Google search and what you can do to improve traffic and ranking. I have a travel blog that I would like to get more traffic to and I have been using Google Search Console for a while to see how I can improve my blog.

What you can learn from Google Search Console

This tool can help you improve your SEO through for example what keywords your site ranks for, what position you have in search results for those keywords, how much traffic your site gets from specific queries, and what other sites have linked to your content.

Improved results

In November 2018 my travel blog did not get much traffic from Google so I have been tracking its performance in Google Search Console ever since. By submitting a sitemap to the tool, I have helped Google crawl and index my site in a more effective way. Then I have been studying what search queries I rank for and some that I could rank better at. I have also started to try to get more external links to my site, through different activities.

Other steps I have taken is to add more content and links in order to improve the over all performance of the site.

The results:
Increased traffic: web search clicks (last 3 months) is up by 3000%, ok it is from a very low level but I am happy that it is going quickly in the right direction.

Increased total impressions: up by 3000%, also from a low level.

Increased average CTR: up from 2.7% t0 3,1% which means that when my blog shows up in search results, users click more often on my links.

Increased average position: up from 40.3 to 29.5 which means that on all the words and phrases that my blog ranks in Google, it has climbed an average of more than 10 spots.

Increased number of internal links: up from 26,000 to almost 54,000.

Decrease in number of external links: down from 2580 to 2360. Interestingly, the drop is mainly due to a huge drop in links from one of my other blogs, possibly due to a drop in the number of ranked pages on that blog. I must investigate.

All in all, by studying the results of my travel blog in Google Search Console, I have been encouraged to make ongoing changes and to add more quality content. This has helped improve the performance of my site just as I had hoped for.

You can have a look at my travel blog here and read tips from my trips to different destinations such as San Francisco, Singapore and Milan.

Metro pulls the plug on thousands of blogs

The Swedish free daily newspaper Metro has been hosting blogs on its blogging platform Metrobloggen.se since 2007. Back then it was described as an immediate success, with more than 2,000 registered blogs during its first 36 hours of operation. The original idea was to share advertising revenue with bloggers, but that model was soon ditched. And apparently the blogs have not generated enough revenue to keep the platform running, because Metro announced today that it is shutting down the service on April 25.

Metrobloggen.se is currently home to at least 10,000 blogs, possibly a lot more. Many are of course no longer active, but Metro’s decision comes as a blow to many bloggers who are left with no help in transferring to a new host. In a note today, Metro says:

“You can continue to blog on Metrobloggen as usual until April 25. After that date, the site can no longer be accessed and no content will be available or saved any longer.

Up until April 25, you can manually or in other ways save your content. Metrobloggen can unfortunetely not provide any tools or help in order to automatically copy your content.”

Exporting content to another blog platform

I do not oppose the closing down of this platform per se, I am sure they have looked into the business model and found that it doesn’t make good business sense to continue. But it’s sad that they offer no help for the bloggers who have generated millions of page views and ad impressions. Metro could have come up with some means to export the content and easily transfer it to another blogging platform. Many bloggers will probably not bother to copy and paste every single blog post and move it elsewhere.

WordPress has an RSS importer for self hosted blogs, but I haven’t tried how it works and most of the bloggers at Metrobloggen probably are looking for easier solutions like blogg.se or blogger.com.

Metro says they are working on a solution, but they say there is no guarantee they will find one before they close the site down.

Update: Ted Valentin has developed a solution to help bloggers export their blogs from Metrobloggen to Blogger or WordPress. Check it out here.

Swedish Page Rank 9 domain sells for 120,000 USD

Over the years, the Swedish web designer Andreas Viklund created a large number of free website templates and WordPress themes. And because most people who use his popular templates link back to his site Andreasviklund.com, it has become one of the very highest ranked sites in Sweden. With Page Rank 9 it is possibly the highest ranked Swedish site ever. According to SEO expert Nikke Lindqvist, about 80 million links from 60,000 domains point to Viklund’s site.

However, due to financial difficulties, Viklund has been forced to sell his domain in a bankruptcy auction. The domain was finally sold today to an unknown bidder for 120,000 USD (plus 25% VAT).

Viklund says in a comment on Lindqvist’s blog that he has had bids for the domain via Flippa.com as high as 220,000 USD but different circumstances made it not possible for the bid to go through.