The History of Imagine Istanbul
With the launch of ImagineIstanbul.com as a blog in January, 2008, I think I should provide some technical, historical background the existence of ImagineIstanbul as a blog.
ImagineIstanbul.com was originally launched in 2004 and ran for about one year. Then, due to circumstances beyond my control (or maybe they were in my control), I lost the domain name “ImagineIstanbul.com” and some guy bought the name and parked it for one year. Since it was fated there would be no buyers, he gave up on making some big cash and I suddenly snatched it back and re-launched the site: ImagineIstanbul.com . I have always viewed this as MY DOMAIN NAME. I think it’s a fabulous domain name because I love Istanbul and I love to imagine the perfection of an idea and, well, the rest is history. And also, Imagine Istanbul is the opening line in the poem: “In Search of the Little Boy of Istanbul” which is what this site is all about in the first place.
ImagineIstanbul.com was first designed as a Flash site embedded, of course, in an html page. Over the three to four years of its existence, it managed to gain a Google Page Rank of 3. This was of course, a miracle which I do not understand to this day. The site, although incredibly beautiful as a Flash site (maybe that is included in the analytics involved in calculating Page Rank – the indefinable mathematical equation of beauty). My traffic to this site was about 10 visitors per month. I had one incoming link in the whole wide world and beyond the basic meta tags and meta description and submitting to Yahoo and Google, I did no other Search Engine Optimization. Only one site in the whole wide world linked to me and I linked to no one. Lo and behold! I ended up with a Page Three Rank according to Google!
In January of this year, I had decided to turn the site into a blog after working on four other blogs and wanting to have one site which would be totally based on art and culture and my passion for Istanbul. This blog is actually based on one poem I wrote. I don’t know of any other blogs which are actually based on a single poem, but that’s what this one is. Of course, from one poem, a multitude of subjects blossom forth and I write and post.
So, I started writing original content, posting regularly, posting photographs, receiving comments, answering comments. One user submitted a comment which was so spectacular that it become an article on the site. I commented on other blog sites; everything you are supposed to do in the blogging world. I joined blogging communities, performed proper SEO techniques and the result was an incredible increase in traffic to the site. Also, I have many people linking to my site, I link to theirs and I create links within my pages to other pages I have already written. I joined Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati, etc., what more should I do?
About two months later though, I noticed that my Google PageRank had decreased to “2”. I was a little offended and I had no idea why this occurred. I am puzzled to the max as to why a site which is suddenly getting traffic, being updated regularly would suddenly decline in Google Page Rank importance.
I tried to discover the reasons, but alas, it is a very difficult thing to find out. It only took me three days in a city of 15 million people to find the little boy of Istanbul whose name I did not know, whose language I did not speak and whose address was unknown. I think the task of finding out why my site was downgraded in Google importance is certainly much harder.
In my entire search for answers, the only thing I could learn was that I didn’t have a Site Map page. I have therefore created a Site Map page especially for Google. Perhaps at the next update of Google Page Rank, I will be back to where I was in their ranking system.
I have had to place the old site on a separate page because it seems to be causing some page width problems with my blog template. So click on the link to be taken to the old Imagine Istanbul site. Just click on the navigation buttons at the top of the flash file, eg., About, Search, Imagine, etc., to see what is in the site.
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Pingback from Court’s Links – 4/23/2008 | Internet Marketing | Strategy & Services
Time: April 23, 2008, 6:32 pm
[...] The History of Imagine Istanbul – Tanya questions why her PageRank dropped after switching to a blog. Tanya, this happens because PageRank isn’t static, it’s comparative. In other words, it compares your rate of link growth to the rest of the net. If the rest of the net is growing in strength more quickly than your site, your rank can drop, even though your site is stronger than it used to be. Focus on traffic though, it’s much more important. [...]