I met a chap called
Colyn Serfontein,
Nelspruit web developer, in a facebook group, who made a few statements I thought were pretty outrageous. I called him on his fallacious statements and
Colyn Serfontein,
Nelspruit web developer, told me to do some research. I did and this is what I found. First lets quote
Colyn Serfontein
Colyn Serfontein’s very own theories on facebook.
Post #104
As an experienced Admin of three large online communities I know the dangers of diluting the community participation.
My concerns are that the splinter pages and mini webs and fractioned blogging sites makes it hard for the OFFICIAL Admin to control focus and oversee responses.
I can have a few COPE sites up in a few minutes fully operational with active forums etc. but the question will be … To what end ?
In the end … ONE site with 1000 visits per hour is worth more than 10 sites with 100 visits each. I assume that you know that Google rank hits by using VISIT stats as well.
I think you should go and investigate … traffic is an important factor and the main reason why doorway pages tend to fail on Google.
So is Colyn Serfontein accurate in his role as a web expert?
I started by searching Google for “traffic relationship to Page Rank”
The first article is to do with Alexa Traffic and Page Rank.
I quote “ I visited two websites in a row, namely CSS Zen Garden and Mail.ru. The first one, a specialized CSS design project, has Google Page Rank of 8 and Alexa Traffic Rank of over 13 thousand. The second one, a huge Russian portal, had Page Rank of 6, yet ranked 23rd in Alexa! The question occured, «does traffic affect link popularity?» Interestingly, although Mail.ru is a much more popular portal, CSS Zen Garden obviously had much more quality links pointing to it.”
Here we can see that mail.ru has a whole lot more traffic than CSS Zen Garden. The difference in their Alexa rank is remarkable. I would suggest that Mail.ru has a whole lot more traffic based on those figures but Zen Garden has a whole lot more incoming links. See the difference in the Page Rank. The site with less traffic has the higher page rank.
I know we need a little more research into this traffic issue than these two sites so I looked some more. One instance is not proof so what I did is I visited Alexa to determine if there was any correlation between traffic and page rank.
Surely if Colyn was correct the sites with the highest traffic would always be the ones with the highest PR. I found the following information and sorted it by the traffic component.
From the figures above we can deduce that Google has the highest traffic and Rank, The whitehouse has very good rank but the traffic is lower than sites with lesser PR. This data is all a little dated being just over a year old so we can’t take this as gospel either. Factually we need to be sure that our data is very good before we start saying that Colyn Serfontein in uninformed.
I searched and searched and the only information I could find was that PR definitely affects traffic, but traffic does not affect PR. I further want to contend that sometimes sites with a higher PR get beaten to the front page of Google by sites with a lesser PR because the site with a lesser PR has better quality content for a specific search term.
There are many factors that affect your placement on the Google front page but existing traffic is not one of them. The more authoritive your site becomes, the higher your PR will become, The higher your PR the more often you appear in the top of the search listings, the more traffic you get and thus the higher your Alexa ranking.
I hesitate to call Colyn Serfontein a charlatan, because that would be in really bad taste, but I would suggest that he does some research.
I have yet to do any real research on doorway pages, but my bet is that they fail because Google does not like duplicate content. By the Colyn frames are so 1996.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Name calling is never in good taste, but this guy is definitely a FRAUD!
Re@PeRs last blog post..Wingsuit Base Jumping
January 6th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
January 6th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
There was some ranting about court cases and sites from the 90’s, when the copyright says 2006, so I didn’t see the relevance to this particular blog.
Oh yes he said that there were different values for different types of links, I guess that was a little on topic here but not so much that I would care.
January 6th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
I hope you approve this comment for everybody to see that way it shows your open for debate.
Arnés last blog post..DSA-1694 xterm
January 6th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Re@PeRs last blog post..Collapse of the US Dollar
January 6th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
I posted the link in one group and on my own profile, hardly spamming is it? If I had gone out there and added to 50 groups, I would agree that I was spamming the groups.
Think before you make silly statements dude. Sadly I have not taken anyone out, They attacked my integrity. I have written two articles about web design and yes this bloke was a brilliant example of how not to do it.
I could hardly respond to his foolishness in a group that I am not welcomed in, I answered his request for me to do some research. I guess my next article about forum design and administration will also disgust you.
I am always open for discussion, The more discussion, the more I learn.
January 6th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
January 6th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Thats a boring challenge, outranking him is not at all difficult to do. The only benefit I might gain is that someone local may have heard the name and be looking for someone that can actually get results.
January 6th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
I do use social networking to market my blog, but will never spam a bunch of groups. That just pisses people off.
The article was linked to from one group by me. I also placed a link to it on twitter, muti, my facebook profile and a facebook note.
That is hardly spam.