SEO Cartoon

Rate this cartoon!

(15 votes, average 4.73 out of 5)

 

 Loading ...

Google Page Rank: Myths and Reality

Should I worry about my pages’ toolbar PageRank?

There are two kinds of Google PageRank – the actual PageRank that is a part of the ranking algorithm, and the toolbar PageRank that is updated from time to time and is aimed to provide webmasters with a general idea of the actual PageRank of the webpage.

The actual PageRank is one of 200+ factors that influence webpage’s ranking, it is constantly recalculated. Lately, its importance has decreased even more seriously. Susan Moskwa, a Google Employee has informed webmasters :

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it [from Google Webmaster Tools] because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. “

Unique content, inbound links from relevant, authoritative sites, keyword-rich link text, and good neighborhood are the things that will influence your site rankings, and not the toolbar PageRank.

Should I use PageRank sculpting?

PageRank sculpting is a method of managing link juice flow by using a rel=”nofollow” link attribute and/or by organizing your non-priority pages for SERP’s in an external include file blocked with your robots.txt. All these are done to prevent your site link juice from being passed to untrustworthy sites that may create bad neighborhood or to secondary, unimportant internal pages.

“The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. – says Matt Cutts in his post about PageRank sculpting, – I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.” Things like intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs are easily and successfully managed by webmasters rather than manipulating crawl prioritization.

Will external linking reduce the Google PageRank of my pages?

One SEO myth says that outbound links without the rel=”nofollow” attribute decrease Google PageRank of the page. Like the majority of the myths, this is untrue.

Webpages’ PageRank is affected only by quantity and quality of inbound links, not the outbound links. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of the Google system encourage links to good sites. But you should remember that your page may be marked as spam and deindexed, if you place 1000 links on it or link to bad neighborhoods. But this has nothing to do with Google PageRank which will stay intact.

Another myth says that the more outbound links you mark with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, the more link juice will stay within your site and flow to other links, which is good if the links are internal. However, Google has changed the PR flow rules in the past year, and even though you may forbid a Googlebot to follow all the outbound links on your page, its PR will be divided among all the outbound and internal links and the link juice won’t stay.

So, if you are afraid of linking to an external site because your PageRank may decrease or your site may drop some link juice, forget this and go ahead and link to valuable relevant pages.

SEO Experiment

Is Page Rank Still A Ranking Factor?

Three years ago we tested if Google PageRank was correlating with the page’s position and pages with high Google PageRank were ranked higher on Google SERPs. The result was more than convincing: for any given keyword – be it popular or not – the average PageRank of the top 10 pages was always greater than the average PageRank of the next 11-20 pages, and so on. We didn’t find much exception from that rule. This time we’ve tried to remake the test and check if PageRank is an important ranking factor.

We assume that, in principle, the lower a page is in search results, the lower toolbar PageRank number it has – at least this rule remains as a general trend. So, we’ve requested results for some very popular and unpopular key phrases and checked the average PageRank of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th “10-position” results pages.

In detail: with the help of the Google Adwords Keyword tool, we have carefully selected 450 keywords (the 250 most competitive and the 200 least competitive) belonging to a few popular topics – real estate, vacation rentals, job search, and cooking recipes. We queried Google for these keywords and got 2250 webpages, retrieved PR for each webpage on the top five results pages, and then found an average PR for each of the five SERPs.

The results prove that the general trend remains only for large amounts of keywords, i.e. the PageRank simple average of 50-60 words gradually decreases from 1st to 2nd, from 2nd to 3rd and so on up to 5th page. However, on the single key phrase level, among all the keywords (popular and unpopular alike), only 22 key phrases out of 450 have an uninterrupted decreasing trend.

What does it mean? Google guys and girls were right, high PR is not all you need for your site’s success in terms of link popularity, and on-the-page factors now matter more than three years ago. PageRank is still a ranking factor, but its role is not as significant as many webmasters think. High PageRank is good proof that you have an established site, but is a doubtful traffic driver.

How The Average PageRank Value Changes From 1st to 5th SERPs

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for October 2009.

Click here to see the complete rate.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors.

Learn more about the formula.

Here you can see how Top 10 SEO companies’ visibility rate has changed from September till November 2009.

Top 10 SEO Companies Trends

SEO Cartoon

Rate this cartoon!

(18 votes, average 4.44 out of 5)

 

 Loading ...

7 Factors Favoring Speedier SEO Results

Most people who want a Web residence for their business begin with meticulous planning of their site’s functionality and design, followed by the selection of an ecommerce solution or user-friendly Content Management System (CMS). SEO is often considered only after such new site owners realize that their beautiful and functional sites don’t attract visitors.

This is the point where newbie website owners familiarize themselves with various SEO tools and training.  Although it has often been said that SEO should begin at the earliest stage of website production, most people do not heed this advice – we can see that from our users’ questions.

In this issue, we’ve prepared an answer to those of you who want a checklist of SEO steps to expedite success.

1. Keywords in the domain name and page URLs

SEO begins with a proper domain name selection. It’s not a surprise that all the meaningful one-word domains are taken by cyber-squatters, so you should think hard to find a short keyword-rich free domain.

Often it’s smarter to base your site name on a proper common keyword rather than a nice name. Be creative, find a form of your best keyword – preferably in the .com area – that is easy to recognize and that is not taken.

Use keywords in the site page and folder names. Although they are not as important as a keyword in the domain name, this is something you can easily manage. If you use a Content Management System, make sure it creates SE-friendly URLs.

2. Absence of obstacles to search crawlers

Make sure all of your important site pages are crawlable. Hide only the areas that you really want to protect from unauthorized visitors.

A good idea to attract search engine spiders is creating a Sitemap and submitting it to Google, Yahoo! and MSN.  Read more about the importance of absence of obstacles to search crawlers.

3. A good Website architecture

A poorly structured site with important pages buried deep inside multiple site folders is bad for many reasons. First, some search engine robots won’t index the entire site, but will limit themselves to the top few levels.

Second, making your visitors travel deep into your site for the necessary information is a bad marketing practice. Take care to place all important information in the top few levels while making your site structure logical.

Third, Google PageRank, still being an essential signal of a site’s relative ‘weight’ among Web resources, can flow optimally if your site is a well-structured document, and your most important pages enjoy many incoming links. More about website architecture can be found in a great article by Shari Thurow.

4. Smart keyword selection and usage = clear site focus

Even these days, the Wide World Web is basically a large library consisting of countless texts that search engines index, and from which they pull the pages that they consider relevant to a searcher’s query.

So the success of your SEO effort depends to a great extent on how well you’ve done your keyword research and if you’ve targeted good keywords. On one hand, such keywords should be often searched for; on the other hand, the number of Web pages that apparently are optimized for that keyword should not tend towards infinity.  The optimal balance of these two factors should give you both top positions in search engines and highly targeted visitors.

Proper keywords should be properly used; this is another point of keyword optimization. Use them in the page elements that search engines pay special attention to – Page Title, headings, body text, anchor texts, etc. SEOMoz gives a detailed review of keyword usage importance.

A good proportion of keywords in well-written copy with a clear site theme form another brick in the optimization wall – they give search engines an idea of the site focus. A distinctly traceable website theme is a positive signal for search engines helping your site to move up in search results.

5. Unique content and its regular updates

Create unique texts that attract both humans and search engines. Don’t found your site on borrowed content – this is discouraged by search engines that use duplicate filters and it has a questionable value for visitors. In addition, people who like your content may want to link to your pages. As the number of links grows, search engines value such sites more and show them in their search results in advanced positions.

Regular content updates and site enlargement is another factor favoring higher rankings.

6. Presence of links from and to authority sites in your industry

Without doubt, backlink optimization has been shaping the general SEO environment since Google introduced their PageRank. Links from quality sites in your industry, especially if they link to you with your keyword in an anchor text, make your site very prominent in search results for that keyword.

On the other hand, if you feel that your site content will benefit from a link to a page on a quality, reputable site in your area of expertise, don’t hesitate to link. Google acknowledged that they not only value links from important sites, but ‘parts of our system encourage links to good sites’.

7. Diversity and regular growth of backlinks

The number of backlinks is very important, but what’s even more important is the number of linking domains. Your site may get hundreds of incoming links overnight if they all are placed on one domain, but a better strategy is gradual and regular growth of backlinks from different websites. Learn how to diversify your site’s link profile.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Global Search Engines (%)

This chart gives the idea of the market share of each of the three major search engines.

Google has a strong intention to not leave any chance to other SEs. Still, little by little, Bing wins the market share from Yahoo.

Visitor Referrers (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

While the share of paid advertising has slightly increased in November 2009, Search engines refer less visitors than during the same period of 2008.