Epublishers make use of print and of online distributors. But almost all of them also depend heavily on their own website as a source of sales and so they need an effective and popular website. As Google Rank is determined by in-coming links it is possible to get a high rank by being popular with customers who link and recommend, by behaving badly enough to be widely discussed, or by attracting pretty much any kind of attention that causes people to link to the site. So the meaning of a high Google rank needs further interpretation. Google ranks range from 0 to ten. Ellora's Cave leads the field with a healthy page rank of 5. It seems pretty typical for a publisher to have a rank of 4 (e.g. Allure, Amber Quill, Aspen Mountain, Loose Id, Liquid Silver etc) Some are starting to look a more mediocre at 3 (Asylett, Black Velvet Seductions, Cacoethes, Carnal Desires, Changeling, Cobblestone, Crescent Moon, Dark Castle Lords, Dark Roast Press, Diabolic, Excessia, L&L Dreamspell and many others)
However lower ranks are not good news no matter how you look at it. The best it might mean is that the press is very new, or has recently changed their url. Some presses on the PLIST don't seem to be doing so well in this area such as Alinar, Romance Divine, Tantalising Tales, Wicked Women of Color which have a rank of 2. Some others also at 2 might do better when they have been open longer (e.g. Shadowfire)
The upshot for authors is that you can show support for your publisher by including them in your blog roll, signature line and other linking opportunities. Also when researching a new press you should probably check their google rank (e.g. by using a tool like PR checker) as part of your research into their overall viability as an outlet for your work. If you want to link to a publisher without helping raise their PR you can use a no follow link.
4 comments:
Interesting to note that I did a PR check of The Wild Rose Press, and they had a 4.
This was very interesting info...I also had a fun time using the PR check to check some of my own websites.
ERECsite is 4, which isn't bad IMHO. The blog is 3--I am not sure why, perhaps because of the high number of outward links?
Actually Google ranking is based other sites linking to you, while Alexa is based on incoming global traffic. For that reason Alexa gives a much better clue into a publisher's overall reader base/draw than Google which basically is reporting all those review sites and authors pages linking back to the publisher.
I believe I said what Google rank is based on--but it is worth restating. Other ranking systems are also informative but I think incoming links (especially from high PR sites) is the best indicator of overall website performance because traffic can be inflated by systems such as entrecard but google polices bought and traded links and doesn't count them.
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