Monday, March 19th, 2007...6:40 pm
English Taiwan : The websphere, the blogosphere, traffic, SEO and the need for a profound change
What is the readerbase potential for Taiwan blogs? is anybody really interested in English Taiwan websites? Using Alexa’s problematic traffic ratings, I’ll quickly discuss the Taiwanese English websphere, blogosphere and the its potential.
What are the biggest English Taiwan websites and just how big is their traffic? I compared a few of the active Taiwan communities I know and this are the results:
Aside from taiwanfun.com, which also has a Chinese readerbase, all the Taiwan sites, even the ones that are considered big - like forumosa.com, are ranked very low and get very little traffic (not in top 100,000 sites). In the Taipei Times’ article on expat websites in Taiwan - Forumosa’s owners shared details about Taiwanted.com :
"Last month averaged 3,000 daily page views and has doubled its traffic and advertising content in two months".
3,000 pageviews is not good performance, especially for a site supported by a previous site and the forumosa.com fame.
How about Taiwan blogs? following Taiwan blogs for over a year and a half, I tried comparing the popular ones I know, but most were too low to even get noticed by Alexa. Here are some of the leading ones (David’s, Michael’s):
Absolute rankings : Forumosa.com (357,315), David’s (374,461), Michael’s (445,042).
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Why is this happening? is it because no one’s interested in Taiwan? Is the expat community not big enough? I’m not sure. Personally, I would like to believe that’s not the case, and Google Trends and other keyword analysis tools show that people are looking for English information about Taiwan. Problem is, they just can’t find it. I know this to be true from when I first looked up Taiwan - I just couldn’t find quality information about Taiwan since it was hidden away at the bottom of search engine results. In today’s online world, search engine placement is everything.
Trying to look at it from an SEO perspective, English Taiwan sites are not performing well, with very low Google PR and the worst imaginable Google rankings on important Taiwan keywords. When it comes to backlinks Forumosa has PageRank 2 (PR2), Taiwanfun - owned by search-engine optimizers - is PR2, Taiwaned.com is PR3. Most Taiwan blogs are written under blogspot and typepad, with the out-of-the-box templates and using subdomains they have little control over. Taiwan blogs and websites do very little website optimization and link promotion, which results in little exposure.
If the English Taiwan blogsphere is to get anywhere, there’s need for a change. Things you can do :
- Get a decent domain with your own hosting and start running your own blog. There is work involved, but you’ll notice the results within less than 3 months.
- Optimize your websites and blogs for search engines. Search the Internet for valuable information about SEO and implement it - clean and meaningful urls, right page-titles, metatags and headings usage, sitemaps submission, robots.txt and .htaccess optimization to avoid content duplication etc. etc. Don’t know how? email me and I’ll try and do a quick analysis of your blog/site and post it on fiLi’s tech.
- Sharing link love - linking is extremely important. Use internal links with good keywords, ask people to link to you using quality keywords, get links to your site from higher PR sites that are outside the blogosphere (directories, forums, etc.).
A few months ago I suggested those improvements to a number of online friends (David on Formosa being one of them), and although it’s only been a few months and there’s still work to be done - I think the results are fantastic.
Conclusion - things are looking pretty bad for Taiwan’s English websphere and blogosphere but there is something that can be done about it. It’s all up to us.
tags: alexa_internet, blogs, Taiwan
Good post! I try to do all those things all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I guess pagerank is important if you sell things on your site, or use adsense, but otherwise I don’t feel it’s the most important thing in the world.
A page rank of zero just means that Google hasn’t officially assigned a page rank yet. I’ve had a pagerank of 5 since my site has been ranked at all. At first that was about 30 hits a day, and now it’s about 270, but the page rank has stayed constant.
Call it old school, but I don’t really like the idea of trying to optimize a page in order to trick a higher page ranking out of search engines. There’s nothing that says my blog or another Taiwan blogger’s site is what people are looking for when they google something. If a site has good, useful content, people will link to it and the ranking will go up. If the site isn’t that useful or interesting to people, then it would be a dis-service to everybody using google for the page to be highly-ranked. Few things irk me as much as an abundance of marketing accompanied by a shortage of substance.
By the way, I’m getting really different numbers from Alexa than you did. My site, toshuo.com, is ranked #354,044. You misspelled it; that’s why it was at zero on your graph. David’s site is ranked at 833,476, yours is at 566,354, and Michael’s is at 531,871.
Oh, thanks for the correction. I wondered why you were so low on rankings, so I guess I need to be more careful with my C&P.
:$ :$
Rankings were shown for last week’s traffic (and not for 3 months) and David’s blog is climbing the rankings steadily.
So you’re Taiwan’s top blogger, right?
I wish Taiwan would have a real pro-blogger like so many China and Israel blogs.
As for SEO - trick search engines? it’s helping search engines understand your site. How can a search engine know what your site is about if you don’t have optimal headings and pagetitle? how does a search engine know your site’s content is authentic if it’s duplicated in several urls?
Since you’ve shared your traffic, I’m now quite confident you can get many times more visits than what you’re getting now, if you structure your site the right way.
Maoman has just informed me that forumosa gets 21500 daily views.
Interesting. Just goes to show that Alexa is WAY off. How much traffic does a PR6 blog get?
21,500 unique page views? I doubt it.
I think the biggest English blog in Taiwan is pinyin.info. The reason you don’t see any huge English language Taiwan blogs is that Taiwan just isn’t a place most English speaking people are interested in or want to read about. Pinyin.info appeals to people interested in Chinese, which is a much, much bigger audience.
I’m pretty sure that if I moved to Japan or mainland China and blogged about the same sorts of things (language learning, computers, and EFL), I’d get at least five times more traffic than I do here. That would sort of defeat your goal of seeing bigger Taiwan blogs, though.
Oh, yeah. I should also add that Alexa’s traffic rankings seem completely meaningless for blogs like ours. My blog gets ten times more traffic than it did a year ago, but looking at the Alexa graph there’s no clear upward trend at all.
I’m not gonna jump in the controversy, specially as i somewhat agree with OP. It’s a bit like hearing a girl telling you that she is beautiful from the inside, and that people need to see this, not her ‘public-ranking’ poor aspect, and that no, she will not get dressed nicely, she will not makeup…
In fact I’d like to ask for help.
I’m not exactly a Taiwan blogger, although i do sometime write about a few of the interesting things i get to see there. Since January I’ve seen a serious increase in traffic (nothing to be compared anyway to sites like forumosa) which has been rather inconsistent in daily terms, and even in terms of months (visits: january 9500, februray 6500, March 10 200, and a slow april so far).
I should add that i also publish a photo gallery which seems to attract a good bit of the traffic, on a different folder on my host.
Where i am confused is that these statistics come from Webalizer, which is run by my host. However i do not seem to see any real difference in terms of comments, or picture views on the website (pictures are counted as viewed when shown full screen).
Moreover i have trouble understand the real meaning of a hit, and why does it vary so much from months to months.
A part of the traffic graph is available here: http://ed.roquette.free.fr/wordpress/?p=64
Ed, I think that’s a flawed analogy. Getting dressed nicely would be analogous to designing a site to look nice (to human readers). SEO is more like a girl who may or not wear make up, telling everyone that she’s beautiful, getting a phone number that’s easy to remember, etc…
That said, it looks like Fili’s doing something effective. A few days ago, Alexa said that this domain gets more traffic than Chinese Pod.
With regards to Alexa rankings, they are useless and have been for some time because they only rank a certain demographic of people that actually installed their toolbar…Generally accepted amongst western webmasters to not represent true stats.
As to the SEO/pagerank issue it could be because of political pressure from the mainland. It’s no secret that Beijing made Google/Yahoo censor/block certain issues, including blogs. Also because of this there could be limits with the amount of resources the big search engines put in Taiwan…taking a long time to update PR, SE positions, etc.
I’ll be adding more info on Chinese SEO in a few weeks on my site http://www.newviewit.com