I was recently reading an interesting article by Portuguese SEM consultant/philosophical bear hunter Carfeu, which brought up some questions about the Toolbar PageRank on SEOmoz members’ profiles. The main question was:
Why do some people’s profiles show PageRank and others don’t?
Some of you may be wondering why that is important. Well… as Carfeu pointed out in his article, members of the SEOmoz community can have the nofollow attribute removed from the link on their profile page after they have accumulated 100 Mozpoints. This system is a great way for SEOmoz to give back to its members who consistently participate in discussions and/or contribute blog entries to YOUmoz. After you exceed 100 points and acquire that link from your profile page, obviously you want to send as much link juice as possible through it, right? So what are the factors that contribute PageRank to a member’s profile page?
In simple terms, the profiles that have the most PageRank are the ones that have the most inbound links from pages that have high PageRank. Here is a brief summary of how PageRank finds its way to your profile through links on SEOmoz that aren’t nofollowed:
Comments – every time you leave a comment on a blog article, whether it’s YOUmoz or the “main” blog, your avatar and your name are both live links to your profile page. This should encourage everyone to participate by commenting on both blogs. However, keep in mind that Google prefers links at the top of the page code, so if you wait too long and your comment ends up being the 50th one on the page… chances are you won’t see a whole lot of benefit.
Blog Entries – every time you submit a blog entry to YOUmoz, the links within the content are followed. This gives you the opportunity to link to your profile page with custom anchor text! However… keep in mind that the YOUmoz blog entries are screened first, so if you link to your profile for no reason, Rebecca will probably deny your submission. In other words, don’t just randomly start linking to your own profile unless it helps the user experience.
World’s Greatest SEO (Note from Rebecca: Sigh…I’ll let it slide, but only because it’s a [weak] example…)
External Links – this is an obvious possibility, but personally, I would only link to my profile from external sites if I actually wanted my profile to rank. Still, if profile PageRank is that important to you, then external inbound links is one way to accomplish that.
In summary, the best way to build PageRank on your profile page is by actively participating in the SEOmoz community.
And now… I would like to try something that many of you probably haven’t seen before. I went through the trouble of scraping together some data and I threw it into an Excel spreadsheet. I have hosted the spreadsheet on Google Docs, and set it up so that anyone can edit it. Google also provides the HTML code to embed the spreadsheet as an iframe, so I’m going to try that too. Here is a bit of background information on what this spreadsheet includes:
- I started by searching Google for inurl:seomoz.org/users/view/
- Copied the top 100 results, including PR, Links, Size, and Cache Date
- Copied the top 1000 SEOmoz members from the users page
- Cross-referenced the two lists in Excel and combined everything together
- Deleted all SEOmoz members that were in the top 1000 ranks, but didn’t rank in Google’s top 100
- There are still some empty holes where a member’s page ranked in Google’s top 100, but the member didn’t rank in the top 1000 SEOmoz rankings. (Since everyone has the ability to edit this spreadsheet, feel free to help out by looking up the member profiles and filling in the gaps.)
So for those of you who like investigating data trends and drawing conclusions from them, this spreadsheet may be interesting to you. One thing in particular that I don’t understand is why some of the members with only 1 or 2 Mozpoints are ranking so high. Any thoughts?
