Tuesday, July 8, 2014

PCFIXES.COM GETS A FACELIFT

My oldest website - which started over 20 years ago - is getting a facelift.  
Well, to be completely accurate it is much more than that - quite a overhaul in fact.  What was started as a convenient set of links and helpful tips back before Windows95 came out has grown over the years to be an confusing and cluttered mess. Then for most of the last decade or more it got very little attention and has as a result many out of date links and is in sad need of an update or proper burial.

   Like the mechanic who seldom fixes his own car, PCFIXES.COM got little attention as I felt it was more important to work on sites I was building for other people, and those that were pet projects of mine. I keep thinking I would get around to it - sooner or later, but did very little with it over the last few years at all.

   Recently, in studying how to better rank sites online with Google, I found a funny and unexpected thing to be true. Some of my older sites had better ranking (probably due to age - surely not due to changing content) than any of the newer sites.  Yes, I do know that older sites are supposed to have a better ranking than new sites - but we are talking about new sites which are a few months old versus sites with 3 years or more online.  Here I am talking about a newer site (maybe 18 months old) and my older sites of 10 years or more.

  PCFIXES.COM, even with the bad links and out of date advice, was still considered useful and having good content (maybe?) and so it was showing some good ranking.  I first saw this when a local younger fellow pointed out a site of mine offering free advertising to him was useless as it had no page rank. Ok... err... well..  my dog is bigger than your dog..
    Heck.. what is page rank and is it even something a small site can obtain? I hit the Google and studied and tested and found sites like MOZ and others and learned a bit more about page rank. I found then my old trusty site had a page rank of 3 - and it had some popular pages within with page ranks of 0 to 3 also.  I was a bit surprised to say the least.  So I put links to some of my new sites in the PCFixes site - and that has helped their placement in search engines some.  As PCFixes has lots of links and that is part of its scope its a natural to put some links to my other sites there and does add to the content.
    Google is basically going for quality - they want a site to be ranked higher if its a quality site - not just one that is artificially higher in popularity.  I think this is a great way to be - and though its complicated to measure and do - they are doing a better job of it each time they revise the algorithms they use to rank with.  I find it odd but telling in a way when I can search with the same keywords and find a site as on the first page in Bing and its page 11 or 12 in Google.    Bing is trying hard to be popular - but last I read, Google still gets the main share by far of all searches.  The TV commercials about Bing vs Google seem to show Bing is as good as or better - but I find it depends on how you search and what it is you search for. Bing may be optimized to look better on popular items - but does not (in my opinion today) do as well all the way across the board in searching for the many other things. Heck, I still use and recommend DOGPILE.COM for searching - they show the top results from a group of search engines and often give you some very useful results.
  Meanwhile - I am keeping the old PCFixes.com site live under one menu button for everyone, and slowly adding bits of the content into the new part of the site - trying to clean, update, improve and shine up things as we go. When finished most of the site should be viewable on smart phones and tablets too.
Wish me luck!

1 comment:

  1. PCfixes.com is now PCFixes.net - I sold the original primary domain and fell back to the .net version which I have had for less time, only about 20 years.

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