I haven’t posted in a while, just been too busy. Then I happened across a blog that seemed to have some good material in it, but it had a pagerank of zero. Odd, I thought. Then I noticed it had not had a new post added in over a year. I wondered if that was why it ranked so dismally?

So I did a quick mini-study to see if there was a correlation between frequency of posting on blogs and their pagerank. I looked at 51 blogs that were each at least six months old (to overcome any sandbox effect) and assigned them to one of five frequency ranks, based on posts over the past three months. Then I recorded the current Google pagerank for each site.

The five ranks are defined as:

  1. abandoned — no posts for last three months
  2. infrequent — less than one post per week for past three months
  3. occasional — one to three posts per week over the past three months
  4. regular — four to seven posts per week for the past three months
  5. frequent — more than seven posts per week for past three months

Here are the results. I was surprised both by the distribution of sites into these frequencies, and the average pagerank for each group:

  1. abandoned — n=2, avg 4.5, mean 5
  2. infrequent — n=12, avg 4.6, mean 5
  3. occasional — n=10, avg 3.5, mean 4
  4. regular — n=16, avg 4.5, mean 5
  5. frequent — n=11, avg 4.1, mean 5

The first surprise was that I came across so few abandoned blogs — my method of selecting blogs was probably responsible for that, I will detail that below. I was also surprised more bloggers posted regularly or frequently (52%) than infrequently or occasionally (43%) — again the selection of blogs probably biased that though.

The main point, the distribution of pagerank vs frequency, shows no consistent effect. The average pagerank for all 51 blogs was 4.23, and the mean 5. Only the occasional frequency differs substantially from that, and I’m at a loss to explain why that would be so — maybe it is a sampling error, since the selection method was somewhat less than random.

I also noticed that one of the two abandoned blogs was ranked PR6 — even though it hadn’t a new post for the past year and half (the last post was dated June 2006). So I think it is safe to assume that posting frequency has no effect on a sites pagerank.

To find blogs I first logged in to the Wordpress site and visited one of my own blogs there. When you are logged-in they present your blog in a frame, with a bar at the top that includes a link to some seemingly random Wordpress blog, so the first 21 sites were selected by repeatedly clicking that link. As mentioned above, only sites older than six months were included in the study.

I began to notice, however, that all of the blogs had posts within the last week or so — apparently they only include blogs with recent posts in that selection. So next I went to Google and looked at ten more Wordpress blogs, using the search term: site:wordpress.com blog and beginning my search at page ten of the results, so as not to include the most popular blogs. I added ten more records that way, but even that seemed to be turning up fairly high ranked blogs, so
next I jumped to page 50 of results, and added ten more blogs.

Then, just to see if it made any difference, I added ten more sites using the search term blog but not specifying a site, and again began at page 50 of the results. Even that far down the list, PR7 blogs made up almost 1/3 of those last ten results — so obviously I biased the results toward higher ranking blogs when I used Google results to select sites. The first 21 sites from Wordpress were biased toward blogs with recent posts, but the average pagerank for those sites was just 3, and the mean 4.

In conclusion then, the frequency with which you post has little or no effect on the pagerank of your blog. Concentrate on providing good content, post often enough to build up a good-sized site, and go for quality over quantity so that you can attract those all-important links. That is what I’ll be doing here from now on, which means you can expect only occasional posts here.