Help Make Blogs More Visible!

There are by some estimates more than 3 million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few "A-List" blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don't get noticed. But this posting could solve that. Let's help the smaller blogs get more visibility!

This posting is GoMeme 4.0. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.

Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Your blog will be part of the pat for everyone downstream from you. That way they can see where they got this message from. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!

Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)

Path List
1. Minding the Planet
2. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).

(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)

Comments

[Bill]

Okay, it has been almost two months.

Has everyone's Blog become more visible?

Has anyone's Blog become more visible?

http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/help_make_blogs.html

is up to 28 backlinks on Google and on 325 Yahoo.

[Bill]

Is anyone analyzing and visualizing Gomeme 4.0?

The method used in the Gomeme 1.0 analysis might work but it looks like the data gathering needs to support less than 1000 results per query.

Searching for

2. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy
then
3. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy
then
4. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy

and so forth up to about

30. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy

will gather the data points but that also includes some duplicates and garbage items.

[Bill]

The drop-off in results at Google continues with only 282 of about 2,390 showing.

[Bill]

Some interesting google results now.

"HMBMV!" is at 3000 results with 280 showing.

This is down from previous results.

Google is starting to drop older listings form the results.

The branching of nodes was interesting. Basically, the Gomeme branched a few times in the beginning, then more near the end, but has not branched at all in the middle.

Based on this search:
#. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy

For # = 2-29 google shows these results.

# total shown

2 18 2
3 120 20
4 127 22
5 152 28
6 23 10
7 34 12
8 14 5
9 2 2
10 1 1
11 1 1
12 1 1
13 1 2
14 1 1
15 1 2
16 1 1
17 1 1
18 1 1
19 1 1
20 1 1
21 1 1
22 8 3
23 5 2
24 3 2
25 1 1
26 2 1
27 22 3
28 2 1
29 4 4

Future branching after the next PageRank and backlinks update on Google may show an entirely different pattern but for now, it is a very peculiar distribution.

[Bill]

Google is now up to 4,070 and showing 274

[Bill]

Google is now up to showing 238 of about 2,870 references

Yahoo says 135 showing of 638

MSN took a big jump up to 154

Ask is up to 12

Alexa is showing 369

[Nova Spivack]

Great stats Bill, thank you!

[Bill]

Google is showing 177 of about 1,270
Yahoo is showing 155 of about 570
MSN is still showing 17
Alexa is showing 257
ask.com is still at 6

link:http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/help_make_blogs.html

shows 211 on Yahoo but on Google it shows no results.

[Bill]

I forgot this:

Google is at 590 and showing 147

Yahoo is at 436 and showing 106

MSN.com has jumped from 5 to 17

Ask.com has jumped from 2 to 6

[Bill]

It is getting hard to track back through all of the branching but if you actually follow the links in the large path lists, they do all go to legitimate individual sites with unique content.

Something else I find interesting is the psychology of the people who found the gomeme on someone else's site but only put your link and their link up on their list. It is the same motivation as a person who gets a chain letter and takes the list of names and addresses and changes them all to himself and his friends.

I think that we will very likely see that the value of this particular version of the gomeme ends up increasing greatly over the next 2-3 months.

None of the pages containing it has any PR or backlinks showing in Google. As that changes over the next month or two, many more people might join in from very diverse nodes.

We may uncover an entirely unknown set of social relationships between bloggers who only find each other via search engines.

[Nova Spivack]

No what I am saying is that I saw some folks had added several different URLs that they promote into a single path list, all at the same time, and then passed it on as if it had gone through all those URL's -- basically it was a way for them to get links to a lot of sites they promote -- which may all be aliased to the same site I supposed -- it looked like a spammer up to typical tricks. Anyway, for the record, the GoMeme experiment has nothing to do with Radar Networks' it's an experiment that I am doing with a group of interested people, including you -- it's a personal interest.

[Bill]

Are you saying that some people are adding the exact same weblog URL multiple times in the same Path List?

There is really no point to that. It would not be of any benefit.

If you are trying to say something else, could you please clarify?

PS: It seems to me that in order to do what Radar Networks appears to want to do, the ability to think like a spammer would be absolutely critical at times.

[Nova Spivack]

Looks like a few people are trying to use the meme for spam by adding their URLs multiple times in the path. That's an interesting unanticipated issue -- it didn't occur to me that someone would try that, but then again, I don't think like a spammer I guess :^)

In any case, the experiment is pretty much finished now -- we got lots of data to look at and most participants were honest and legitimate.

[Bill]

LEVEL 27 : http://www.stockhelp.net/personal-finance/2004/08/help-make-blogs-more-visible.html

I think this is level 26A:
http://theobusiness.blogspot.com/

and level 26B from the same person:
http://freshwineskins.blogspot.com/

There are several branches in the 20's

Google is listing 437 and showing 107 of them.

Yahoo is at 362 and showing 39.

[Miguel Angel]

LEVEL 6 : http://www.enblog.org/2004/08/cadenas-de-blogs-para-buscadores.htm

[Bill]

for "Help Make Blogs More Visible!".

Google: about 429 w/ 98 showing
Yahoo: about 343 w/ 34 showing
MSN: 5 results
ASK: 2 results

[Bill]

Some interesting negative results in the last few hours.

Google has dropped to 186 from 241
Yahoo has dropped to 116 from 121
Alexa has dropped to 72 from 81
MSN is still sitting at an incompetent 5
and Ask Jeeves still says: Your search for "Help Make Blogs More Visible!" did not match with any Web results.

[Brian]

241 at Google as of now

[Bill]

Yahoo is now at 121. No other changes.

[Bill]

Google links are up to 237 now. Yahoo back down to 50 and msn is at 5. Alexa has risen to 81.

I also checked Ask Jeeves, just for chuckles, and they have no results but showed lots of spam in place of any real results.

[Bill]

Perhaps we should all post this search to our weblogs so it hits the top links on some of the aggregators (those which work) and people will become more curious about it.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Help%20Make%20Blogs%20More%20Visible%21%22

Google Search: "Help Make Blogs More Visible!"

That might help propagate it a bit faster.

[Bill]

Since blogs are, after all, blogs, and owners can post whatever they want, whenever they want,

(is the phrase "Blogs will be Blogs" coined yet?)

If everyone were to take the largest Path List they can find and post a link to it that would increase the importance of the longest paths and improve the spread and effectiveness of the nodes which spread the farthest.

Yahoo has increased from 46 results to 50. All others have not updated this morning.

One reason Google may be showing different results is that when you query google.com you actually get results returned from one of many data centers. Each data center may, at any given time, be in a different state that any other data center due to the time it takes to copy the new or updated information between them. Somtimes they have radically different results in the San Jose Data Center than at the one in VA, IN, etc.

[firemind]

I saw an older version and it looked interesting. I followed the links to your blog. I posted it in my blog and we shall see what happens.

[Nova Spivack]

This is a reply to Phil Rignalda's comment above. A Ponzi Scheme usually involves some form of payment by the participants, this does not. The problem with Ponzi schemes is that eventually a point of "market saturation" is reached such that the last people in the pyramid have nobody else to sell to, and so they don't recoup their investment or make a profit. In this case, there are over a million blogs -- so saturation is far, far, far away. Anyone who participates in this is likely to get some benefit -- it is very unlikely that market saturation will *ever* be reached in this experiment -- it just isn't going to spread that widely (at least I very much doubt it, based on the previous 3 experiments). It is true that the earlier one is on the list, the more the benefit to them in terms of the number of links they will get. However, given that the list can branch at any node, and that saturation hasn't even been nearly reached, everyone who participates at this stage has roughly the same potential benefit. If this spread much more virally than it seems to spread, such that most or all branches stemmed from just a few nodes near the top of the tree, it would disproportionately benefit just a few nodes. However, I think the branching of this meme is much more chaotic -- in fact, a node far down the list could generate a lot more branches than a higher node and end up with many more links. So it's not so simple as you would suggest in fact.

[Nova Spivack]

I'm seeing 161 on Google... funny how Google shows different numbers of results.