Hi Bill,
Thanks so much for taking the time to add your valuable input. These are just my opinions - I certainly support multi-faceted views about the subject. My objective here is not to overlook the value of having pages indexed by Google at all. It’s quite clear that having quality content indexed is a healthy phenomena and certainly something to strive for as a business objective.

The only point to the lay person is to make it clear that this is not an end all be all for measuring the business success of a site. In fact, I believe it to be a very poor measure of overall success. The truly valuable measures, as suggested above are those that will help an individual get closer to measuring a return on their investment. Pages indexed is simply a starting place to give you an idea of possibilities. I’ve seen many sites with realtively small indexes competing well above sites with comparatively large indexes in terms of actual recommendations served out by Google. Generating leads and sales is the name of the game. And of course this is only one viewpoint in the vast sea of web space out there.

Kristen:

Thanks for allowing this opportunity to add some thought on this subject that I find so passionate.

>>> Generating leads and sales is the name of the game. <<<

I don’t disagree that for any business to function and create a sustainable revenue model, it needs customers, and leads (by definition) “lead” to customers. However, the purpose of a business blog solution is to compete for attention, and one requirement for attention is to create a lot of ways to grab attention. Tolerating a plan that grabs only fraction of the possible ways to grab attention can be justified on many dimensions - too costly, not enough time, lack of skills — these are a few good reasons to lower your indexing performance expectations.

Making the decision to tolerate constrained indexing [however] should not be based on the reasoning you put forth (i.e., sites with small index footprints [sometimes] work well too). This is [at best], a tenuous justification given the fundamental reason why businesses typically decide to participate in the conversational web. They choose this path to garner attention in non-traditional ways. Suggesting that (a) it’s not necessary, or (b) it still might work - are each inappropriate business drivers.

As you point out (and also not in debate), creating lots of attention that is directed to one or a few [un-indexed or un-findable] page(s) is possible. However, it also requires a completely different (and a highly proactive) marketing approach that is only achievable through advertising mediums that are unlike blogging and more like traditional marketing. In any case, this approach is typically far more expensive than business blogging alternatives, even expensive ones like MyST Blogsite.

Suggesting that it’s ok to embark upon a “conversational” advertorial strategy that doesn’t get all your pages indexed, is not a good strategy at all. Indeed, why publish knowledge about anything if it cannot be found in search engines?

Consider this example —

If you have something important to say at a large gathering, would you want to whisper your message into the crowd, or shout the message so everyone can hear it, or broadcast it so they may all consider your viewpoint? Business blogging is specifically about this metaphor.

Some real data …

In a microcosm we can easily perform empirical tests to understand this subject more deeply. Ironically, you reference a common customer (Artur Ciesielski) and the blog ArizonaApartmentInvestor.com. Artur is a prolific writer with excellent and deep insight in the Phoenix real estate market. In addition to ArizonaApartmentInvestor.com, he also has another domain (RealestateConfluence.com), another Wordpress-based site by Real Estate Tomato. This relationship is far more interesting for two reasons – (i) he also has MyST Blogsite™ (PhoenixMarketTrends.com) and an integrated multi-domain search system (MyST VS™). Setting aside all of the vendor-competitive angles we could discuss here as well as the fact that some of these domains are very new, let’s look only at the data related to index footprint and attention opportunities. Google shows the following index footprints for each of the domains (at this moment):

- ArizonaApartmentInvestor.com: 71 pages
- RealestateConfluence.com: 234 pages
- PhoenixMarketTrends.com: 4,470 pages

If we then look at the search engine traffic from Artur’s MyST/VS™ system we can glean a number of patterns. Without disclosing confidential data, I’ll speak only in terms of percentages and at a very abstract level.

ArizonaApartmentInvestor.com represents about 1.5% of the total pages in Artur’s findability arsenal (an aggregate impression in Google of about 4,775 “places” that have been indexed). Even with a collection of biased visitors using Artur’s MyST/VS™ search solution, recommendations to ArizonaApartmentInvestor.com from that search engine are rarely higher than 4% of the total traffic. In contrast, the search-generated traffic to RealestateConfluence.com, is generally three to five times higher. This is predictable since the number of indexed pages is a little more than three times higher.

This is just one data point and there are always additional biases that must be considered because the sites are probably designed to serve different audiences. However, having many (or few) opportunities to be found (even in a microcosm such as this) clearly has an impact on traffic patterns.

Personally, I can’t find any logical reason to spend the grueling effort to write something great with the risk that it not be indexed; search engine marketing is simply too crucial for small businesses. Justifying the risk of writing great copy which ostensibly lay dormant in a desk drawer, and occasionally discovered only when a visitor happens to open the right drawer, is not an ideal search marketing strategy.

In my view, investing in a content strategy requires two fundamental tasks - (i) writing the content, and (ii) making prospects aware of the content. As such, I think businesses do (and should) think this way about their brand messaging and how they invest in their content.

Cheers! –bf

“Does it make sense to compare two blogs for potential pages and topics indexed when the blogsite is so much older with so much more published content?”

Not really, and that’s why I specifically refrained from comparing Artur’s long-standing blogsite to his really new (still fresh paint) Arizona Apartment Investor blog with Kinetic Knowledge. It would be like comparing apples to fermented wine.

Instead (as my comments clearly say), I compared the really new blog with Real Estate Tomato to your service in terms of index size and the traffic each attracts based on respective page index penetration. What the data shows is that traffic generated from Artur’s MyST/VS search to his Kinetic site is about 1/3 that which his Tomato site generates. This is approximately the same ratio of index footprint distributions between these two sites; hence there’s a correlation and likely causal relationship between index penetration and traffic. If the Kinetic-produced blog were to expand to say three times the footprint of the Tomato site, I would expect the search traffic from Artur’s MyST/VS solution to mimic that shift in indexed content.

While the anecdotal evidence that his Kinetic blog certainly positive, the debate in this thread is about justifying small index footprints, and I don’t see any evidence to support a position that weak indexing is still okay.

bf