Blogging is definitely not a glamourous career to have, even in the beginning. It takes a lot of typing and hours, quality content, and social networking, to even try to become an authority. However, once you have become an authority blog and you decide to go on a vacation, what happens to your blog?
This article will give you some small insight to exactly what happens and why I always say you should have a good blog hiatus by scheduling posts ahead of time. It might take a little extra work and time, but in the end, if you are trying to build a competitive blog or website in your niche, then you MUST keep fueling your blog’s content.
The Experiment Rules
While I did not want to just stop blogging, I made sure to blog very little, sometimes not even once in a week. It was difficult, and believe me, this was a painful experiment as I knew I was going to be hurting my site stats.
As a side note: I had unintentionally went on a hiatus back in 2008 for several months, only blogging once or twice in a month. The results reduced my PageRank from 4 to 2, but went back up within months of frequent blogging. At that time, I did not really focus on looking at any other stats.
I decided to pull in just a couple factors for this experiment: length of time, number of posts, PageRank, and Alexa Rank.
The Beginning Stats of the Experiment
On May 15, 2012, Blondish.net was:
Google PageRank 5
Blog posts averaged .22 day for the past 457 days. (180 posts between May 15, 2011 and August 15, 2012)
Alexa rank at 49,627
End Stats of this Experiment
Experiment official ended on August 15, 2012, giving this a 3 month window to see what results occurred. Here were the results
Google PageRank 4
Blog posts averaged .22 per day for the past 92 days. (21 posts between May 15, 2012 and August 15, 2012)
Alexa rank at 80,067
Experiment Summary
Although I saw a 30,440 decrease in Alexa Rank and 1 point down from Google Page Rank, I did not suffer any loss in comments. This is the reason I did not include the number of comments in with my posts. In fact, that remained fairly steady as visitors went to other evergreen posts on the website.
I also received more than 70 messages from social network sites and even my email asking when I would publish my next post. For that, I apologize for the inconvenience, but this experiment is something I have wanted to do for some time, even if it meant hurting my site stats.
As for traffic, I also did not go into detailed traffic stats religiously, but of course, unique traffic did decrease. I relied on Alexa rank as that has been a great reflection of how my site has gone. That, and I really am not going to go through a lot of different services out there that monitor traffic. I wanted to share stats that bloggers usually look at.
I already knew that my results before this experiment would show what I already knew and blogged about in the past, mainly due to the fact I have been blogging for many years, and have seen what hiatus or lack of blogging has done to other sites.
It is important to keep your blog fueled with content even when you want to take a break from blogging. It might take writing and scheduling posts, but do not just leave your readers hanging.
Interesting … but I guess i shouldn’t be surprised. Your blog had a “base” and likely kept going because of the variety of articles and perhaps their search engine listings.
I’m not really sure that Alexa rankings are all that important, ditto PR. When my blog’s PR was 7 it earned around 15 cents a month thru AdSense. When it was PR 3 it earned over a hundred dollars a month. Another anomaly: Google stats tell me I have approx. 1400 visitors a day on average, but other sitemeters show between 300-600. I have discovered on my own that there are several types of visitors that don’t “register” on the other sitemeters, including people reading via RSS and certain smartphones.
I had a blog that had been dormant for three or four years yet still racked up about 400 visitors a day. Odd thing is, blogspot deleted it, and they notified me by email that it was “spam” (which I assure you it was not).
I still don’t understand why blogspot keeps blogs created and abandoned as far back as 2001. My blog was just as “real” as blondish.net!
Nice little blog you have here!
Hi Dave (and Nile),
Yes – I do agree. One needs not to forget the RSS readers and people on your mailing list of you do use email marketing. Glad you’ve mentioned this.
Nile,
Interesting experiment and timely for me as well. In the midst of my move from South Florida to South Carolina I sensed it might be a challenge to keep my blogging regularly paced.
I like the idea of pre-writing entries and scheduling them to post. Ah, finding the time to do that right now is illusive. I’ll keep at it though.
Thanks for your insights!
RICK
Fascinating experiment. Thanks for sharing the info! I slowed down my daily pace to 4-5x per week and didn’t notice much difference. I also received emails asked if I was okay. Funny how expectations work 🙂
Hi Nile,
Thank you very much for the interesting experiment!
I face this problem as well. Last month I left my blog for 2 weeks for focusing university exam, and the traffic suddenly drop so much. For every blogger, keep posting is the key to keep our readers and rank on Google.
Smashing post Nile thanks for sharing the info! I have been running Get Clicky from Yoast along with Google Analytics lately it has provided some additional useful information too.
Thanks for your beautiful explanation.Also we have to analyze our older posts.
What an interesting experiment, Nile! The results aren’t that shocking, but the Alexa Ranking was surprising. But being that that particular stat is severely skewed because only those visiting your site with the toolbar installed counted, I do find it disconcerting.
Nice experiment.As alexa uses its toolbar to gather information about the site traffic.so when you stopped blogging the number of users visiting sites would have decreased which affected your alexa rank i guess.Anyways Kudos to your efforts.
Nile,
Don’t take it personal but you didn’t stop blogging during experiment. Stop blogging means no new content published on the blog. If you had already scheduled blog posts, your readers couldn’t know whether the blog post were scheduled in advance or not. You were still active in blogging from their perspective. The only difference that they might get is that you didn’t respond to comments on time.
Hi Frank! I appreciate your response, but this experiment had a few rules to it according to most common blog hiatus practices that I have seen over the past 10 years. At the most, I have noted those who went on hiatus would blog 1 time a week and at the least 1 time a month.
The only exception I can think of to your rule is Glen Allsop from Viper Chill fame. But the key is that he writes monster, value added posts that are almost more like books. I’m a plodder at one blog post per week for my two blogs, but that’s the maximum I can do with the amount of time I have left after my wife, 1.5 jobs, 2 kids, 4 cats, 1 Gekko, 1 Hamster 🙂
Nile, you risked a lot doing this experiment. Thank you very much for the case study! Although results might differ from site to site I really don’t want to try it on my site 😛
I am happy you did not loose so much it terms of page rank and readers. Now you need to get back your PR5 which is very hard work 🙁
Hi Nile,
Thanks for this post. It goes to show that if you already have a strong base for your blog is likely it will continue to do well. Also, I’m sure people will get around to reading past blogs they may not have read otherwise. I wonder though how it would affect someone starting off though? It may be a bit more adverse I imagine.
Hi Nile, hopefully I won’t experience blogging hiatus or if I would. I hope my blog’s traffic won’t decrease.
I have stop Blogging for 1 month I have notice a significant drop on my views per day, so For me this is not a good option specially for those beginners who mainly use blogs for optimization.
hope this helps
Traffic will decrease, If you stop blogging.
I am agreed with Jack its rare thing to do when you stop blogging my website PR decrease on low traffic in few days when i was stop these sort of activities.
That sort of test takes real “BALLS”, I guess if you posted that you were going to be away for a while then that might of stopped all of the messages via social media sites coming through.
But blogs are like plants, they need constant flow of content of they can die.
this is called a ”dangerous experiment”. i don’t have guts for this type of experiment. but its really appreciable , you did it for some research. but can we expect more posts from now on.
I agree with the author that when u stop blogging then it will effect badly our blog. Page rank falls , visitors fall. Thanks for your case study .
Thanks for sharing your experiment. Ultimately, it’s the engagement is what fuels a blog. I think, search engines consider blogs differently from a website expected to update their content periodically.
Thanks for sharing, always intresting with tests. My own blog has so few visitors so if I take a break nothing really happens…:P
Really well experiment. I am a new about your subject but I think your post is so important to me. Thanks for your nice sharing.
I love it when people pull experiments like this. A lot of us don’t have the time or positioning to be able to test things out., but posts like this offer chances to learn in a much faster way. This is my first post that I’ve read of yours but I’m looking forward to reading more.
That’s a pretty interesting experiment. I guess that’s about what I’d expect but honestly it seems a bit surprising that your rank didn’t drop more. It’s cool to know that even if you have to take a hiatus, it won’t completely ruin your blog.
thanks Nile,
for share your experimental data. that’s very useful for beginners. but I couldn’t understand completely about the connection between PR down and traffic down. keep posting. It’s very useful for us.
Cheers!
I think we can be both, I have learned so much by reading your blog. It always amazes me how much there is to learn. Nice experiment, Nile.
That’s what exactly happened with me, and currently I am very very shaken after leaving blogging.
My blog went from pr3 to pr2 when I started posting once a week instead of once a day. I imagine that stopping altogether would reduce it down to 0 in no time.
Hello, thank you for sharing your experiment with us. It is interesting to know that your rank does not drop by a scary amount and that you still had the same amount of bloggers.
So bottom line, don’t go on an hiatus until your blog is really established.
This is a well thought out experiment and useful info. for all bloggers of any niche. Thanks…
Interesting experiement. I have stopped blogging for long periods of time and the only noticeable change is a slow decline in traffic. I guess results may vary depending on a multitude of factors. Very informative article though, I dug it.
I’m gald you did this, I don’t have time these days to test things, that was a reaqly interesting ad worthwhile experiment, tobe honest, I’m surprised that your rank didn’t more than it did.
Really it hit badly to your blog when you stop blogging for some day. you will see that your traffic decease continuously and your page rank also decrease.
Thanks for sharing such nice information for us.
i know when i went on a break my traffic plummeted. For me the key to keeping traffic up is to never stop writing. if i go on break i always schedule a few posts.
One really needs to have guts to do such experiment espcially when its going so nice. But it did help in giving some important statistics which otherwise would only have been guessed. Great work on your part.
Absolutely correct. There can be seen an adverse effect in ranking due to inactiveness in blogging. Once i suffered from this problem.
Thanks.
wow thats crazy how your results change after you stop. Thanks for sharing im definitely going to keep this in mind when i feel lazy next time.
-Brad
thanks for doing something i was contemplating.
I now have a better idea of it’s effects.
great post
sw
A pretty interesting experiment. I would have thought that you will lose more points at your Pagerank. But obviously for google pagerank plays no great role anymore.
It is like a full time job! Post scheduling is your friend I guess. I look after a lot of different blogs and I try to get a load of content done at once if possible then just schedule the posts.
thanks for the tips. i’ve been very busy so i havent posted anything on my website ( http://www.MyLucban.com ) for the past 2 or weeks, my ranking has been steady at 900,000 heheh. i will be writing this week and will that post scheduling thing. …hope it works!
Thanks for sharing this information , I loved this ,
I faced the same problem last summer ,
Thanks for sharing this valuable info ..
Posting regularly is a real problem for me. Automating is definitely the way to go, but I can never find time!
You have taken a risky job for your website but it seems easy to overcome.
How to get / raise the PageRank for blogs?
Hmm, just wondering what were you doing with the extra time you had when you were blogging less and how could you be back with your full fledged blogging when you thought it’s time. Cos it’s hard to change habit and addiction, and I believe blogging is some sort of addiction, of wanting to have viewers. Anyway, I know you didn’t do this just to write a post like this, but to test google algorithm. Nice thing that you shared it with us, thanks! 🙂