I wonder if the structure of the domains is affecting the search engines.

@foxxtrot Lots, lots, LOTS of reasons why this is all happening the way it is. Here are my thoughts, mostly at random.

1) Your Blogspot blog showed up higher for one reason: You’re probably signed in to Google when you did your search, AND Google knows that you’re you and you’re looking for your blog. Google will ALWAYS show you your stuff fairly high in searches. They’ll also show you the stuff from your Google+ connections. But those aren’t the real rankings.

To find out where you’re really ranked, set up a Private Browsing/Icognito Browsing window on your browser, and then go to Google. You won’t be signed in, and Google will have no idea who you are. Do your search there, and you’ll see what actually is ranking.

2) Your blog on your website is going to be your best SEO resource. But, an offsite blog is a good way to build high value backlinks to your blog. Plus if you do a good enough job on that blog, it will rank high as well. A high-value, high-ranking blog that points at another blog will definitely give you a boost.

You do have to make sure that you’re always putting up high-value content on both blogs. If you start taking shortcuts or copy-pasting content from one to the other, you’ll see a drop.

3) Joomla sucks. I hate it. A lot.

4) If you want to see what kind of backlinks you have to your blogs, do a linkto: search. Type in “linkto: YOUR_URL” into the search window, and see how many you get. Also, make sure you have  all the blogs on your Google Analytics profile. You may be able to figure out what’s going on by looking at your traffic sources.

5) Make sure you have your main site and other blogs in your Google+ profile. Also make sure you link your Google+ profile and rel=”author” tag to your name. (Read more about that here: http://problogservice.com/2012/10/10/get-ready-authorrank-set-up-your-google-author-identity/)

@erikdeckers

Erik, thanks for pointing out the Google problem of searching for yourself or company while signed in at Google.

I often forget to tell people this unless they ask, but more and more I’m finding that too many people THINK they’re ranking high when they’re only seeing themselves through Google’s personalized rose-colored-glasses.

I know I’ve danced a joyful gig celebrating my own unfounded results a time or two. Since discovering my own ignorance, I’ve made it a daily habit to disable my personal results while working, then phycially turn it back on when not working. Otherwise, I’m apt to trick myself again…

Robin Carlisle

@richardmclaughlin in theory that sounds good, but just remember that if your whois report shows that the domain names are all owned by the same person/entity that’s a big “tell” as to what you’re really up to.

Hi @juleswebb   

Penalties do not exist for ownership in and of itself.  I own plenty of websites and multiple blogs without ever endangering any Google rankings with cross linking those entities.  It is NOT dishonest or against rules to own more than one entity online. Posting duplicate content at those is another matter altogether. 

Eileen 

Hubspot just came out with  7 Common SEO Myths to Throw Out the Window Immediately today.  

Mytha #5 is relevant to this conversation and might prove an interesting read.

Myth #5: Microsites and Other Domains I Own That Link or Redirect Back to My Site Will Help My SEO

Cheers!

Jules

One more thing… the pages viewers view will go way up… and time one site will go way up. Four pages viewed and 20+ minutes on site is very easily achieved once you put videos on ALL your posts. I have ONE video that people will spend 30 minutes watching over and over again. Boggles my mind. Plus, you get all that YouTube analytic info that you don’t get with Google. It really does add to your “intelligence-gathering” effort… and has let me know exactly what people want to see and spend time with and what they don’t.

As far as that goes, I have one BIG takeaway to use… go use an animated drawing program NOW. It doesn’t even matter what the message is… for some reason, people will stay till the end waiting to see what that hand will draw out. It’s amazing. I have one that’s 7-minutes long, but people apparently are watching it more than once at a time. Who’da thought!

Robin Carlisle

Jules, here’s a link to one “drawing” video I did with VideoScribe. The average viewer stays a lot longer than its 7-minute length. I was just testing out this online program for the first time, with zero pre-planning or thought, and it’s turning out to be a great little addition to have in there because people spend a lot of time watching it. And that increases my average “time on site” numbers.

http://robincarlisle.info//?s=unsociable

Noticing this anomaly on more than one of my sites, I started checking out the views of other channels that had “drawing” videos in them. They seem to have more views, likes, and shares than other typical videos. I found probably 50 of them where that seemed to be the case, but looked no further.

(But please excuse MY website right now. We had a little bomb go off and ALL my navigational category listings down the left side of the page went “Poof” and disappeared except those for farmers and caterers, along with a slew of videos. An internal war between plugins was at fault, but the fallout was vast and I’m still cleaning up, lol. Anyway, this site is still a work in progress and all the navigational elements are still not in place… but any feedback is more than welcome here).

@atlantarobin that’s pretty cool. What service are you using to create that? I googled “video scribe+what’s your story” but I couldn’t determine what you were using.