Today, I was over at Digital Point, checking out what was going on and there’s a big discussion of a page rank update. People are complaining that their page ranks went up or down for no apparent reason, and it’s freaking them out.
But you know, … Does it really matter?
Here’s what matters: Your site showing up in the results pages. That’s what matters.
I’ve said this before: Page rank is a way for Google to play with your head.
If you have PR6, Google decides it hates paid linking and BOOM! PR0. Happened last year.
If you have a PR3, it’s better than a PR2… why? You have no more listings today than you did yesterday. Who cares?
What you should watch and care about are these things: continue reading »
In a news article at Telegraph.co.uk yesterday, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, says that Google is getting ready to have the ability to translate search results into any language, and to have the sites translated for you when you click through.
So, if someone in the U.S. searches a topic and the results include information from a German newspaper, the results would be in English, rather than German, and when you actually got to the site, it would also be in English rather than German.
That feature alone would have helped me when I researched materials for my biographies of the The Dalai Lama
and Mohandas K. Gandhi
. That might have been pretty sweet, but translations aren’t always up to par. Yet, that’s just one area where they’re making advances.
Mayer says that in the last 70 days, there have been 38 new search products that she has overseen. That’s pretty danged aggressive, no?
Here’s another one: continue reading »
Unless you’ve had your head in the SEO sand, you know that there’s a new search engine to reckon with. It’s not really new. Bing is just MSN Live revamped in a very good way. And the new kid on the block is getting market share. Will it usurp Google’s top spot? Not likely, at least for a very long time, but you just never know. Who ever heard of Google before 1998, right?
So, Bing released a new article in its Community: Link Building for Smart Webmasters which talks about natural, organic link building. Hmm… they actually could be Google clones.
We know the right ways: article marketing, blog commenting (not spamming), press releases, yadda, yadda. But they also mention that reciprocal linking is cool… IF you’re linking to sites in your niche. Linking to sites with no relation to what you’re doing won’t help you and in some instances can actually hurt.
So, let’s focus on stuff that will cause you harm: continue reading »
As online marketers, the most important job we have is building our lists. To do that, the generally accepted tool is the squeeze page, which is nothing more than a headline, a few benefit-laden bullet points, and an optin box. Some squeeze pages might be fancier (as Frank Kern would say), and some are just really simple and still get the job done. But even if you have video, two optin boxes, and a really snazzy looking page, it’s still a squeeze page.
To search engines, it’s that proverbial sow’s ear.
Search engines live or die based on the quality of content it delivers. So, that’s what they’re most interested in seeing — good, quality content that enhances their users’ experience.
So, how can you turn your squeeze sow into an elegant purse? continue reading »
Anyone in search has heard about Google’s new technology that is supposed to put Google’s indexing into hyperdrive. It’s like taking Google to Starbucks for a double espresso, and it will make this very fast search engine even faster.
Who wants to complain about that?
Well… you might, depending on how quickly your pages load. If you have an e-commerce store that is graphics inundated, for example, you want to be sure that your images are compressed and sized to be as small as possible for a faster loading time. Google, it seems, will be taking your load time into consideration when evaluating your rankings in their search results.
Matt Cutts talked about the rollout here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/ if you want to check it out. What Matt says is that the rollout isn’t scheduled to happen until after the holidays, so you have some time to get your pages in order. Here are some sites you might be interested in using to evaluate the changes to be made: continue reading »
ATTENTION: Please read this post first… http://ovblogger.com/1720/twitter-wr-wr-ong/ Duh.
Did you realize that your Twitter profile page (the one with all of your own tweets on: http://Twitter.com/username) has page rank? If it doesn’t, you’re not tweeting that often. If it does, and it’s a good PR, you may or may not realize that putting links on that page pass page rank to the sites on it, right?
Yep. I just checked mine out because I heard that Google just did another page rank update (Google Surprise PageRank Update by Navneet Kaushal, SearchNewz.com), and I see that I now have a PR5 on my Twitter page. Hmm… Need to send more links to that page to help my sites.
Check our your Twitter page and see where you stand. If you update Twitter frequently with cool info, you’re probably going to find a good PR punch.
It doesn’t hurt you to show up on other people’s profile pages when they have a high page rank, either. That’s why putting stuff out there that folks enjoy and having it “retweeted” by them really makes a difference. So, if you’ve been using Twitter only to chit-chat and you’re in business, you’re wasting a valuable SEO tool.
Yes, you should be chatty on Twitter. But, you shouldn’t ONLY be chatty. Plan what you want to write in Twitter that concerns your business everyday. Maybe plan out 10 Tweets. You can go in once an hour and tweet something cool. If you want to set them all up at once, you can use a site called “SocialOOmph.com (was Tweet Later),” which allows you to schedule your tweets throughout the day.
I’m not suggesting that you send out ads all the time, like some losers do. Really, they’re not using Twitter properly, either, and they’re probably pissing a lot of people off and creating bad karma. You totally do not want that. continue reading »
A couple of months ago, Google created a new feature for it’s toolbar called “Sidewiki.” This allows your site users, who may or may not be customers, to create helpful information or insights in connection with individual search results. It also allows people to share these comments on Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, and your Google profile pages.
It’s kind of a cool feature that’s obviously designed to get people participating in a social way with Google’s search function, and also to get people to download and install the Google toolbar. I don’t have it, don’t want it, and rely on other cool Firefox add-ons to give me more information than the toolbar ever did without it clouding my reading pane. But…
What makes it a little scary is that Sidewiki can be a tool that people can use against you, if you’re in business. Imagine your unhappy customers writing their discontent into the wiki, which lasts forever. Imagine furthermore that same unhappy customer creating such a stir that everyone piles on. Makes me think of that Bugs Bunny cartoon refrain, “All pile on the dog pile.” When someone starts a feeding frenzy, it’s not pretty. continue reading »
Want to know what pisses spiders off? When they come to a website and see the same danged title and description for every page in it. Not every page on your site is identical (if it is, you’re really in trouble because having duplicate content on your own site will make it drop like a stone in the rankings), and each page should have its own unique set of information.
The same goes for blogs. If you’re not adding a unique title and description to every post you make, you’re making a big mistake.
You need to get either All-in-One SEO Pack or HeadSpace 2, either of which allow you to add unique information to every post you make.
HeadSpace 2 makes it really easy. All you have to do is click “Page Title” under the post blank, and your post title will be carried down automatically. It doesn’t work very well with descriptions, so you’ll have to fill in the blank there, but it gives you a good chance to use some keywords for your page, as well.
Remember, the title and description of your page are what show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages), too. So, if you want people to see crappy information about your post, be sure to leave that information out. continue reading »
Oh, you’ve seen the sites. “Just $49 and we’ll submit your site to a gazillion search engines! It’s great for SEO! It’s amazing! Give us your money!”
PFFFTTT!!!
This is just one of those bullshit services that newbies fall for.
Here’s the deal… DO NOT pay anyone for search engine listings. The robots will find you, even if you have no keywords in your title, even if you have a crappy description, even if you’ve only been online for a week. Robots will find your page and decide whether to rank it or whether to come back at all.
Want to see if the search bots have seen your page and when?
Just type your domain into the search engine and see what comes up. At Google, if you click in the “Cached” link under the description for your site, you can see your page and the date and time that Google last visited. If it was the current day or yesterday, cool! You’re updating often. If it was a month ago, you have problems, brothers and sisters. You need to add some fresh stuff to your site or you’ll never rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages) at all.
Bing also has a “Cached Page” link that you can check out, but they’re still slower than Google. Google had my page from yesterday, while Bing hadn’t been there since 11/5. You know how often I post, so…
Yahoo also has a “Cached” link, but it wasn’t working, so… I can’t comment on its frequency by using this technique.
But there is a foolproof way: You can also go into your hosting account’s c-Panel dashboard to check this out. Most have a feature called “AWStats,” which tells you quite a lot of information, including which search bots visited and how many times they came during the month and even how many times they successfully accessed your “robots.txt” file. continue reading »
All I can say is, “Wow!” I just read a post by Ann Smarty over at SearchEngineJournal.com about some very cool Yahoo pipes that you can run. (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-useful-yahoo-pipes-to-monitor-your-brand/14320/: “5 Useful Yahoo! Pipes to Monitor Your Brand”)
For those of you who don’t know what Yahoo Pipes is it’s an aggregator for different types of content. For example, they’ll take several feeds and put them together, either to make specialized reports or for publishing on blogs or elsewhere. They allow you to mashup lots of stuff and make it really cool.
For example, I read several SEO blogs and instead of having to go to all of them, I have a Yahoo Pipe that gives me everything at a glance. My Pipe is called “SEO Goodness Pipe” and you can find it at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=YsYIE89w3hGA4vj2BNV6qA. The reason I call it that is because I also use the pipe to send interesting SEO stuff to Twitter every hour or so.
People love it, and retweet the stuff I send out all the time. I’m finding myself on people’s Twitter lists and it’s a great deal all the way around. I made the Pipe, people get to read the same cool stuff I love on Twitter. They’re happy, I get more followers, they retweet, and the circle goes ’round and ’round. continue reading »
