Creating Blogger Blog Subdomain

Creating a Google Blogger blog subdomain is relatively easy, although it does sound daunting. This Blogger blog is a subdomain of the website http://www.pictures-of-cats.org/(PoC). You can tell that by looking at the website's address at the top of the page. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is http://cat-chitchat.pictures-of-cats.org/. The dot in the middle separates the main site (to the right) and the subdomain. If this was a pure Blogger blog site using the "blogspot" URL it would be http://cat-chitchat.blogspot.com.

What is the point of making a blogger blog a subdomain of another site you may have? Well these are the reasons, rightly or wrongly why I did it:

1. Blogger allows you to create a nice friendly website extension to a conventional website. It is a place where you can tap into all the great facilities of Google Blogger. And if you are not too geeky and have built a conventional (non blog type site) on your own, I think, people like us need some tech help! And it's all free. So the first benefit is that it allows us to create a blogger site with all the advantages that brings as part of our website.
   


2. I have concluded in this post that hits to subdomains are counted by Alexa and that they contribute to the Alexa ranking although they are not listed separately.


3. You can link from subdomain to main site. It is a satellite site that can bring in traffic to the main site.


4. It is very easy to create pages on a Blogger site. If you are working alone it is difficult to compete with websites where more than one person build the site. The ease and facility of Google Blogger translates to increased speed.


5. A subdomain URL is arguably nicer than than a blogspot one but and this is important, you shouldn't (in my view) create a subdomain of an existing and successful Blogger blog because you change the URL. If your blog is successful there will be inbound links to it and that helps create Google Page Rank. All that will go if the site's URL is changed. OK, it will come back in time but it might not return to the past level because over the period when it is recovering its inbound links other sites march on and progress. This may result in losing customers and they may never come back. Also it is irritating for those people who have linked to a successful blog to then find that the link is broken. They might not repair it, which could leave the Page Rank permanently lower than before. Don't mess with a successful website. That is what I say.

OK, here are the steps to creating a Google Blogger blog subdomain:

1. You need to enter data into both Blogger and your main website. You will need then to check with your hosting company whether they allow subdomains and if so what the procedure is to create a subdomain. I can't talk about individual companies except my personal experiences with SBI who host PoC. With SBI the process is simple:


2. This is what SBI says, "All you need to do is create and name a subdomain, map its “CNAME” to the provider you have selected....." The two primary pieces of information required are, CNAME and your blogger website name:

The CNAME is provided by Google and it is always as indicated in the picture (ghs.google.com). The subdomain name is the name chosen by you and the text that precedes the URL of the Blogger blog (indicated in red below):

http://cat-chitchat.blogspot.com. Both these will be needed by the hosting company who hosts your main site. As to Blogger this, as usual, is easy and the steps are these:

1. Find your way to the control panel for your blog. You can get there from the dashboard and click, "layout" or from "customise", top right hand side of the navbar. Once there, select "Settings" and then "Publishing".


2. This is how the screen looks for a blog I have on "Cats in Paintings":

Next click on "Custom Domain". Then click on "Switch to advanced settings". In the page that comes up you will see the panel into which you type the subdomain URL. It follows the words, "Your domain". For this website the finished result looks like this:

This is the screen when you have entered the subdomain URL and saved the settings by entering the word verification and clicking "SAVE SETTINGS". Incidentally, I leave "Use a missing files host?" as default.

That is essentially, it, except you have to wait for a while. It might even be a day or two during which the URL cannot be reached. The time delay will come from your main website host company. I think Blogger acts almost immediately. The key to Creating a Google Blogger blog subdomain is to get the main hosting company settings correct as the Blogger side is very user friendly.



From Creating Google Blogger Blog Subdomain to Home Page

Do Subdomain Hits Improve Alexa Ranking?

Update July 1, 2022: This is still a useful resource but you probably know that Alexa no longer exists! And I think I might have caused it 😎. I wrote to the chief executive of Alexa and asked for his help as Alexa had made a mistake on inbound links. They would not fix the error. I was forced to go over their heads to the top and I wrote using snail mail. I did not receive a response but Alexa pronounced on their website that they were 'retiring' soon afterwards. I think they knew that there were accuracy problems which were unsolvable so they closed. About 3 days before they closed my site was dramatically reduced in its ranking in an act of spite by the Alexa employees. I did not care less by then as it was game over for Alexa. I found them to be arrogant and unhelpful. Typical of all big internet companies. They are high-handed and don't know the meaning of customer service.

April 23rd, 2009: Do Subdomain Hits Improve Alexa Ranking? For the big sites Alexa lists out the sub domains and it says, "Where people go on..." followed by a list of sub domains. Here is an example. It concerns SiteSell.com a site that has a high Alexa ranking:

This site is a subdomain of http://pictures-of-cats.org/ (PoC). You can see that in the address bar at the top of the page; there is a dot before the pictures of cats url and the address before the dot is the subdomain. It is important for me to know if this subdomain contributes directly to the Alexa ranking. In other words, do the hits and pageviews per visitor etc. to this subdomain website get added to the hits from the "main site" (PoC) to produce a combined figure?

Well, when I first built this Blogger site and made it a subdomain, Alexa used to list it (just like it lists the subdomains for Sitesell above). And it provided a percentage contribution as well.

That at least means the Alexa was and is (judging by the above) measuring hits from the subdomains. Otherwise it would not be able to tell us the percentage of people who visit them. At the moment Alexa does not show this site as a subdomain (as it used to) but Alexa does refine and change what it shows us (update at March 2011 - it is now showing subdomains, see image below). The recent changes bear that out. The point I am making is that Alexa is still measuring visits to subdomains but unless your site is ranked very highly it won't show the percentages as for Sitesell.com.

March 2011: Showing subdomains for PoC

Alexa say this about subdomains:

"Alexa's traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com)

All this says is that Alexa does not rank subdomains separately. In other words it just ranks one website, the main site. This actually gives us the answer, I believe. We can infer from this statement that it balls the figures for subdomains and main domain together as this is the opposite to ranking separately. That in any case is my assessment of the matter and I think it makes sense. Do Subdomain Hits Improve Alexa Ranking? Yes, in my view. One last point.

Another subdomain to PoC is this site: http://teh-kitteh-antidote-anecdote.pictures-of-cats.org/. I asked this lady, Valley Girl (VG), if she would join PoC as a subdomain. She had just started her Blogger blog. She agreed, I am pleased to say, as she is a great asset. Her blog achieved a Page rank of 4 in about 4 months. This is better than PoC (PR 3) and this site (PR 3). I wondered why there was no great improvement in my Alexa ranking. I think the answer is the commonsense one. VG has a nice site and a damn good PR but not much traffic. Lets say she gets 100 visits a day. PoC gets about 6,000 unique hits a day (Google Analytics). This site gets over 2,000. So VG's contribution currently (and this will change) is small in terms of Alexa ranking. 100 hits represents 1.67% of the total hits and will not show up on Alexa, which is not that accurate anyway for sites outside the top 100,000 (PoC is ranked about 117,000). Even if she gets 600 hits a day it represents 10% of the total.

Update: Here is a screen shot of the Alexa web page in relation to www.pictures-of-cats.org:

Some of the keywords come from this sub domain, namely:

• cat poison
• alexa algorithm has been changed

Indicating that Alexa is reading sub domain information.

Feb 2011, update: Below: this shows Alexa statistics in relation to subdomains at Sitesell.com as at this date. It is clear from this that Alexa recognizes subdomains and it is worth noting that the founder of Sitesell, Dr. Ken Evoy is a talented SEO expert. Would he jeopardize the SEO of his website and subdomains? He likes a good Alexa ranking and his site has a good number of subdomains. What I am saying is that Alexa recognizes subdomains and in doing so subdomains will improve the Alexa ranking if they are worthwhile web pages that collect hits. The forums at SiteSell are probably the most visited part or SiteSell and it is a subdomain (see below):

Screenshot from Alexa

One last point. Google sees subdomains as a different website to the main domain. So, if I have two similar pages on the same subject one on the main site and the other on a subdomain, Google might list them both out, one below the other in a search result. See below:

Google search result for "norwegian forest cat" Feb 2011

From Do Subdomain Hits Improve Alexa Ranking? to Home Page

Alexa Contact Info Contact Us

I am finding that there are a number of broken links to Alexa.com. For example the Alexa contact info contact us page is broken. There is another page about changes at Alexa that is likewise broken. This is weird for such a big company. It indicates that all the changes made recently have been hard to manage. The link goes to a page where it says, Oops! There was an error on the site. Do you think they have problems at Alexa? Are you OK you Alexa guys and girl? I still look at the stats all the time! And get upset most of the time!

I don't think that you would get this with Google. I guess it will settle down but when you get Google listed Alexa pages that simply don't work, it is odd. These are the broken links at the time of this post:

• http://www.alexa.com/company/contact?&qterm=&p=
• http://www.alexa.com/company/announcement

Lets hope they can sort it out quickly.



From to Home Page

Alexa Algorithm has Changed

I am sure that the Alexa algorithm has been changed at the same time as the website was updated. There was a decision to upgrade everything, what you see and what you get. Some sites have benefited massively and some have fallen. This site has fallen. That is despite building a lot of content over the last 4 months or so.

The Google Analytic figures are more or less stable for this blogger site subdomain and the main site. There has been a small fall off in page view but the Analytics figure show a 0.03% drop over months so this is infinitesimal. Also my web hosting company shows very little change. But Alexa on one day showed that this site had a traffic ranking of 1.4million when for months and months it was at the 115K mark. That represents a drop by a factor of more than 10! Alexa is also rating my page views much lower and I say it is inaccurate. And I know the site has to be below 100,000 for accuracy but why? Surely that is a problem that Alexa needs to address. Also this site is ranked 118K close to 100k. But it is falling....! Traffic rank for Sunday was severely depressed:

Showing the downward trend.
This is not seasonal but sudden and at about the time the Alexa website changed

On the basis of stable traffic figures but a falling Alexa ranking (it is now around the 180k mark, a big drop) I conclude that the mathematical formula used by Alexa has been changed. And it seems that the change is in favor of tech sites, blogging and social networking sites as the buzz seems to be to be that these are more modern and useful to companies like Alexa.

This may be a reaction to the credit crunch, the financial crisis. It is seen as a symptom of the "old way", the bad way and we need to move forward and out of that world. We need new people to manage the banks and basically business. The Alexa people probably reflected on all this and decided that the future was young modern sites and the algorithm had to reflect that. That is my guess, of course. I am probably off the mark a bit or a lot but it feels that the changes are based on that kind of mentality.

Chart published under published under
Wikimedia® creative commons license license = Attribution-ShareAlike License
Author Kozuch

I also think it pays to stand back and look at the big picture to find answers to what the intentions of Alexa are (note: this is just me speculating). Alexa are owned by Amazon and Amazon are in the internet business. The more people in the world who can use the internet the more business they will do. Globally including developed and the developing world 22% of the people use the internet (see chart above). There is plenty of room for expansion. To achieve that Amazon need to encourage and facilitate internet use. This can be achieved by encouraging tech sites to flourish to educate people and social sites to spread the word. To achieve that, I argue, Alexa have changed the algorithm to rank more highly these sorts of sites and businesses including new social networking sites. Lets not forget a site can be ranked anywhere by Alexa. They control the rules and it is not just based on how many visitors the site gets. Google have become the world's most powerful business, I believe, on the back of encouraging internet use by providing free software and products. It is the classic "preselling" technique so talked about on internet marketing sites.

It seems most of the cat sites are affected negatively. i-love-cats is affected positively, however, why? Well it has been around a long time with lots of inbound links and it does have a forum. That might be a factor. I don't think anyone has actually figured out the underlying changes. But I think what I have said above are relevant.

Update: Well, there is no doubt that Alexa have made changes to their algorithm as there has been too much disturbance to the traffic rankings. The dust has been kicked up. I say this having checked a number of sites. Some tech site have improved their rankings by large numbers. However, the day after I reported the above the traffic ranking has, at least for one day, returned to normal for my site so right now all seems to be kinda OK.

One factor in benefiting would seem to be if your site has a lot of inbound links, a decent page rank basically. It seems this is more of a factor in their algorithm. For example, Blog Buster has improved dramatically while enviroman's Blogger tips and tricks has dropped because he basically screwed up. His site was hosted by Blogger but he wanted to go fancy and upmarket and have a "proper" URL so he bought a domain name and redirected his domain from Blogger to the other hosting company. The URL looks nicer but as his URL changed he lost his inbound links and his pagerank and now his Alexa ranking too all for a nice URL. Never do this! The URL is unimportant. The content is important. Also it would have made sense to talk about SEO on Blogger sites if you yourself use a Blogger site.

Further update 14-4-09: The downward trend stopped yesterday but that is probably due to the massive effort I have put in recently!

16-4-09: There have been a lot more sites mentioning this since I first made the post. I guess that confirms it. It's history already! In hindsight I don't think the changes to the algorithm have been big (you couldn't do that as it would undermine the whole thing) but there have been changes and when they were made there were initial glitches and now it is more settled.

27-4-09: Things have returned to normal. Traffic is up. But why? For me, there was strong evidence that the Alexa algorithm had changed because there was too much change in traffic rankings at the time this post was first made but maybe they changed it back in a panic when they saw the drastic change it had on traffic rankings. I can only speculate.

2-5-09: Yes, another update. Traffic is up for this site and the Alexa ranking is currently getting better. So, although changes certainly took place it is not clear what happened subsequently. I mentioned the website, i-love-cats.com that improved dramatically in Alexa rankings after the change. That site has no gone back to "normal". It almost seems that they made changes and then changed back but it is not clear.



From Alexa Algorithm has Changed to Home Page

Pictures-of-Cats.org Diary

This is an entry in the Pictures-of-Cats.org Diary. I thought I'd start to diarise the building and maintenance of the www.pictures-of-cats.org website. For all budding website builders this might have some value.

I've been building for about 18 months now. I work on the site each day and try and build at least one page a day. With the Blogger site I can build more quickly so it works about at nearer 2-3 sometimes. Some of the major pages can take several days to build.

What is the overriding sentiment that I have after working on the www.pictures-of-cats.org website for 18 months? This is it: it is hard, very hard to increase the number of visitors. The site is doing well. It get more traffic (per Alexa) than the Cat Fanciers Association website, for example. It gets more than www.messybeast.com, for example. There are a few (perhaps 2 or 3) cat websites that get more traffic in the world, yet I would like more and this is proving a challenge.

At a certain point attracting more traffic gets harder. You get a fairly steep curve and then it plateaus out. The most important personal characteristic in website building is persistence, no doubt about it.

The current Alexa ranking is about 110K. The current page views are hard to calc. but according to SBI it is somewhere in the order of 3-400,000 per month. It may be a lot more as SBI doesn't measure this Blogger site for page views. SBI tells me I get about 4,000 unique visitors per day to the main website to which I could perhaps add 1-2,000 for the Blogger site.

I am currently working on a page about cat head shape, having just finished a page on cat body types. These are, in a way, specialist areas about the workings of cat fancy people, people who are involved in showing top quality purebred but still of interest to those of us who like cats.

Visiting Ken and Helmi Flick

Today I am travelling from London, England and visiting Ken and Helmi Flick in Dallas, USA. I have been to Dallas before in the summer and it was hot. I hadn't realized how hot Texas can be.

I am going over to thank Helmi for her contribution to the Pictures of Cats.org website. Her agreement early on to allow me to publish her photographs has made all the difference to the website which this morning has an Alexa ranking of about 109,000. This means that there are 108,000 sites in the world with more traffic but considering that there are about 200m or more sites that is good.

I also hope to meet some people and generally cement the United States connection. I would like to see if some rescue centers in America would like to use the Pictures of Cats.org website to promote their organizations by using a sub-domain of my website. There are other ideas that I have and we'll see where it all goes.

And, yes, I'll have some fun too. I am looking forward to meeting Nox and Sky, Ken and Helmi's British Shorthair cats (see photo above). Sky is blue/grey and Nox is black. Helmi is going to photograph me with them, which will be great. Visiting Ken and Helmi Flick is going to be a big thing for me.

Visiting Ken and Helmi Flick to Home page

Photo: of Nox and Sky copyright Helmi Flick

www.cats.com

Cat (Siamese) and Ferret - they love each other - photo by _schadenfreude

www.cats.com has been around for ages and never filled its potential. How can I say that? The domain name is impossible to buy now. It's been impossible to buy for a long time. Yet www.cats.com is Alexa ranked 400,000. With a domain name like that and the time the site has been on the internet the Alexa ranking should be much better. Alexa is an Amazon.com company that measures traffic to a website.

I'd expect the domain name to be worth lots more than the website. People search for the www.cats.com website. I guess that they do this to look at cat breeds and find information about cats.

Well, if I say it myself and I will, Pictures of cats.org is much better. The photographs are by Helmi Flick and the best amateur photographs of cats in the world and the facts are very carefully researched. The facts are not regurgitated "facts" but real information carefully thought out. And if you disagree you can tell me by leaving a comment. That will be fine. I am open to criticism. And the Alexa ranking of Pictures of cats.org is 116,000 at Oct 2008. The lower the number the better the site by the way. Yahoo.com is number 1.

Sure, things could and will change. But www.cats.com should do better and probably will after this post! One last thing. All the money made at Pictures of cats.org goes to cat charities and it made over $700 dollars in October 2008 on adsense alone.

www.cats.com to Pictures of cats home page

Learning to build websites

Learning to build websites takes time. I'm still learning but I only started 10 months ago. In fact I learn something new each day. But it's more than just about learning to build websites. You have to make sure that what you say on the site is of a high quality and that means knowing your subject. And you also have to build quite a large website (that's my own view).

But the most important factor of all in this process is to know how to get your website seen by the search engines. Because without it being seen and listed in the first one or two pages of the search results, you are pretty well wasting your time.

Sounds a bit daunting doesn't it? But you know there is a website hosting company which holds your hand, so effectively, throughout the process that you not only get seen by the search engines you can earn money while you're building the site. Sounds like utopia doesn't it? It just happens to be hard reality and I know because I've been through the experience.

I am typing this on a Google Blogger sub-domain to the main website,
http://www.pictures-of-cats.org/. I started to build the site about 10 months ago. It is in construction. It is not highly monetized - I've just put some Adsense on the site and it makes about $180 per month, which I give away to help cats. Man, I love cats.

My target is about $1000 per month - yes, a long way to go but it's great fun getting there and I earn while I do it and the amount I earn goes up as I progress, which is very motivating.

Learning to build websites can be fun if you do it with SBI. The President is Dr. Ken Evoy. He participates in the forums, which are the best on the internet. He is very open and his mentality has filtered down throughout the company making it very friendly and helpful. If you follow what he teaches you are guaranteed to succeed even if you start from scratch.

SBI is not a restrictive formulaic type method. There is lots of freedom as long as you follow the basic SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. Take this Blogger site for example. It is part of my SBI site (look at the URL - web address - in the bar at the top of the page). This gives you freedom to use Blogger's ease of use and SBI's fantastic SEO power. That is one example; there are a lot of features that you can employ at SBI to make your site successful.

Yes, it costs $299 normally for each year (SBI runs promotions - currently one at $100). But you know, great though the promotions are you can make 5 to 10 times that figure in the first year, so who cares about the subscription. One well known SBIer made $2,000 in his first 6 months and another top SBIer makes $100,000 per year from Adsense alone (he has a site that is Alexa ranked about 50,000). It can be done but not by jumping on the nearest freebie website hosting business and starting without thought. Try Learning to build websites the SBI way and genuinely succeed.

This is not a boast but this site as you can see is Alexa ranked about 200,000 and getting better. It gets about 2,000 unique visits and about 8,000 page views a day. And I got there in 10 months. And it is all thanks to SBI and Dr. Ken Evoy. When I started I didn't have a clue. Everything that I have learned I have learned from the SBI team.

Get started Learning to build websites and earning at the same time.

Learning to build websites to home page

Alexa Toolbar

The Alexa Toolbar is a free download from the Alexa website. Alexa is part of Amazon the mega sized online shopping business. The figure that you see and which is used by Alexa to rank the site is the site's position in relation in the world. It is based on the number of visitors to the site plus how many pages that they visit. This site is ranked about 300,000 at March 2008 (at Oct 1st 2008 it is ranked 120,000 - going up). This means it is the 300,000th site in the world in respect of the above criteria. Yahoo is no.1. Google is about 3 or 4. Wikipedia is about 8 or 9 and so on. The big social networking sites are ranked high as expected.

This site's ranking is quite good, at March 2008, considering it is built by a single person with no outside help except SBI, who host the site. This site is a sub-domain.

The Alexa method of measuring ranking is not that accurate for sites outside the top 100k. It is very hard to get inside 100k. There are about 100m+ sites in the world, could be near 200m if you include the blogs which are growing fast (200,000 daily).

The highest ranked cat sites are around 150K (Messybeast being one). The biggest market is the USA. If you all have the Alexa toolbar and visit this site or the main site, http://www.pictures-of-cats.org the ranking will improve and I can sell more advertising and give away the revenue to cats.

The toolbar is useful and simple. It is benign and won't hurt your computer. It gives you an idea how popular a site is (i.e. visited) which can help in making decisions on buying from the site as an example.

From Alexa Toolbar to American Bobtail