This is a test, we are clocking the speed of content indexing, this is nothing but a test. The regularly scheduled series, “ROI in social media” will continue in a moment. For now I want to test the speed at which new content on this blog gets indexed in Google.

We are also running this test in parallel with richardkannegieser.com

We are testing the theory that the higher the PR of a blog, the faster it gets indexed. Some of you may say that this is common sense. We don’t consider anything common sense, everything is a “theory” until it is definitavely proven through direct testing.

You might say we have been jaded by “listening to experts” whose advice is ultimately wrong. We are running this test for internal reporting purposes to members but will share the results publicly here.

Anyways… back to the test:

This blog registers a PR 3. We don’t know the true (behind the scenes) PR so the public PR 3 is the number we will work with.

The blog at RichardKannegieser.com (one of our analysts) is brand new. Both blogs are hosted Wordpress blogs… Okay ready?

Time of submission of new content 11:32am Friday, August 22nd 2008

UPDATE… @ 12:19pm Friday, August 22, 2008

Speed from submission of new content to indexing in Google … 25 minutes.

Results from RichardKannegieser.com …

His new blog post was indexed in 14 minutes… A PR 0 was indexed faster than the PR 3.

Conclusion… PR does not appear to have influence over the speed in which new content is indexed. There are some differences though:

  1. CharlesHeflin.com is now indexed at or near the top of the SERPs for all kinds of long tail terms
  2. RichardKannegieser.com is not indexed anywhere near the top for similar keywords

We believe that this is a result of the difference in PR (Page Rank)… Though this result is not conclusive by any means, we have successfully tested indexing speed. Another factor to note is that both blogs are Wordpress blogs hosted on our server. Could this be a case for using a hosted Wordpress blog as your content management system? … Maybe. Wordpress is extremely easy to use and now (as opposed to 2 years ago) you can easily build a Wordpress blog that looks and acts like a website (not a blog). That is the subject for another post.

I hope you found these results interesting our take is that PR makes no difference in indexing speed. This is a theory that has been passed along by many (myself included) … Now we have possibly debunked the myth. What do you think?

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