Experiments In Blogging

A web developer's strategy to just keep blogging despite good reasons to stop

In the last two posts I've talked about two reasons why posting blog posts everyday can be a bad idea.

Those two reasons can be summed up as:

1. If you are writing blog posts all the time you don't have time to promote them so no one will read them anyway
2. If you are concentrating on quantity quality will suffer and so will your rankings/website authority

Mainly because I want to be able to say, at some point in the future, ".... yes, I'm a blogger, I once posted 100 blog posts in 100 days"

Silly, I know, but it is also quite an interesting experiment in how the search engines react to the changing content. And also I'm learning about the writing process.

So what am I to do?

Well I've come up with a geeky, cheaty, experimenty solution.

There is an html tag I can use in the header:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

What this tag does is it tells the search engine robots not to index the page. Follow any links yes, but don't put the pages in any search results.

So this way the search engines shouldn't be judgemental about those pages, so they shouldn't adversley effect your websites ranking if you were to, say, write many posts with very little content.

But what's the point of that!?

Well, I can write a whole batch of posts with not much content, and give them the noindex tag, say just inspirational quotes that have helped me out, for example, which shouldn't take too long.

With the time that frees up I can try and write longer in depth posts and think about how I could promote them.

That way I can keep the unbroked posting line, and also write some posts that are more useful.

And posting short posts with the noindex tag, just to keep the unbroken posting record might seem a bit pointless, but it does perform another small experiment.

For every blog post I write, some 'teaser' text appears on the front page of my website, that is, a snippet of text about the latest blog post, with a link to it.

So, the front page changes every day giving it some 'freshness' and showing clients that there is somebody home. So if I do that for, say, 10 days I can see what effect freshness has on my front page. Also, it will probably be useful to do one thing cosistently for a period of time to get more relaible feedback for how it effects rankings.

Consequently I get a break from having to publish quality posts every day, but I satisfy my ego by not failing and by continuing towards the goal of completing the 100 posts in 100 days challenge, and I get to justify my ultra thin posts under the guise of a scientific experiment.

Is this just daft?

Any suggestions for a post that you would find really helpful?