Posts Tagged ‘pagerank’

301 Redirects Cause PageRank Attrition

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Call it PageRank attrition or PageRank decay, but the story seems to be that 301 redirects cause it.

OK, I guess this doesn’t surprise me, but what’s the real story here? Is it that you shouldn’t do 301 redirects? No, sometimes that may in fact be the best thing to do. I think the real lesson is to plan your website and Internet marketing strategy so that you don’t have to resort to 301 redirects.  Otherwise, there may be times when you do want to redirect a page to another page or an entire site even.

I won’t go into all the scenarios when such a redirect might be necessary. I will say that PageRank is not the holy grail of metrics. It’s somewhat important in earning trust, but if you find yourself having learned that previous ways of conducting business online are less effective than buying a new domain name and starting over, a 301 redirect might actually help you. Besides, your new domain is going to gain PageRank of its own so in time that attrition won’t really matter.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »

Do You Know Your TweetRank

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

OK, it’s a trick question. But not really. If you’ve been wondering how Google ranks your tweets in real-time search then there is an interview with a Googler than shed some light on the subject. Amit Singhal says that ranking tweets in real-time search is a lot like PageRank. So I’m looking forward to the day when we’ll all be discussing our TweetRank scores with verve and passion.

It’s interesting that the comparison between ranking tweets and PageRank has been made because PageRank has been likened to a popularity contest, but that’s not accurate. It’s about quality more than anything and ranking tweets is the same. Google appears to be interested in the number of followers a person has and how connected socially – quality – those followers are.

Singhal says it this way:

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

So this is incentive then to get on the A-list and be followed by the top bloggers. Rather than simply going for huge numbers of followers, try to find the right followers for you, quality followers with lots of well-connected followers themselves.

I guess that’s a little like PageRank. What do you think?

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Posted in search engines | 5 Comments »

Are PageRank And Rankings Related?

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

It’s easy to get confused about such concepts as PageRank and search engine rankings if you don’t spend a great deal of time studying how search engines work. One common misconception about search rankings is that they are tied to one’s PageRank number. This is not the case.

PageRank is a way Google has devised to assign an authority number to websites within the same niche based on how many other sites link to it and the authority ratings of those sites. It is an algorithm based largely on quantity and quality of backlinks.

While search engine rankings also rely, to some extent, on backlink analysis, the factors influencing are much broader in scope. There are literally hundreds of factors that influence how a web page ranks for the keywords it targets. One important ranking factor is domain age. A website that has been around for 10 years or longer has a much higher chance of ranking for a particular keyword than a page that is just 1 year old. The age difference, however, is not a guarantee of higher rankings as that ranking factor is used in conjunction with hundreds of other ranking factors. But it is one factor that can give a particular website an edge in the ranking wars.

Webmasters should not confuse PageRank and search engine rankings. They are not related and one does not influence the other.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | 1 Comment »

Should You Focus On Google PageRank?

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

A few years ago anyone and everyone who was doing any Internet marketing at all consulted Google’s PageRank system to determine whether a website was trustworthy or not. Marketers would bounce back and forth between Alexa and PageRank to see if a site was all that and a bag of chips. Some people still do.

However, PageRank is not as important as it used to be. It still has some relevance. But it isn’t the grand prize that it was at one time.

Small businesses trying to do business on the web should keep their eye on PageRank just to ensure that their reputations aren’t slipping. If your reputation begins to decline then PageRank could be an indicator (although there are other indicators that are better). If you have a strong reputation online then PageRank is definitely an indicator.

Titus Hoskins at SiteProNews argues that PageRank is still relevant. He makes some good points and I agree with most of them.

Bottom line for me on PageRank is to use it in moderation and with judgment, but not to get carried away with placing undue importance on it. It’s one indicator of trust online, not the only indicator. Don’t dismiss it, but know its place.

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Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »

Why Links Are Like Currency

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Link building is one of the most important things a webmaster can do. On-page SEO factors are important, of course, but it is difficult to achieve high rankings for most search terms today without some kind of inbound link strategy. That involves searching out places to put your links and ensuring that you have the proper anchor, that your links point to the right pages on your website, and that you don’t do too many too fast.

Because Google places such a high priority on inbound link quality, it is necessary to evaluate your linking strategy to ensure that you are helping, not hurting, your website. PageRank is based in large part to the number and quality of inbound links. When one site links to another it is considered a vote of quality.

Because of this, when you link to someone else’s site from your own you are essentially helping them rank better in the search engines by providing the proper anchor text and linking to the right page from the right page on your site. That link could potentially earn them money. That’s why many webmasters have started selling links and link buying has become its own industry. But if you buy and sell links and Google finds out then you’ll be penalized. It’s a never ending game based on one fact: Links are like currency. Pure gold. Money in the bank. Build enough good ones and you’ll earn your keep.

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Posted in link building | 4 Comments »

Why Paid Link Building is a No No

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

It seems like a lot of work to build up decent links and truthfully, link building can take up a lot of your time, so why not just buy the links? While those who have been online for some time know that this can be a death sentence for your search engine traffic, if you`re newer to the world of link building and SEO, you might not be aware of the issues surround paid links.

You see, it used to be just fine to buy links. People picked them up for a song left, right and center and they got a lot of great “Google juice” and sent their websites soaring through the search engine ranks. It was a time when it was extremely easy to beat out the competition simply by investing enough money in links.

Then Google became aware of what was happening and gave a warning, letting website owners know that they weren`t going to allow this. Very few people listened until there was what we call a “Google slap”. The top websites lost their PageRank if they had paid for links. There was a lot of chaos in the world of paid linking at that point and a short time later, even more people were Google slapped.

These days, most website owners are paranoid about buying links and for good reason. While it may seem like a faster, more efficient method of link building, it`s not a good idea to risk your traffic this way.

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Posted in link building | No Comments »

Footer Links: A Simple Way To Increase
PageRank Of Internal Pages

Monday, September 15th, 2008

One very simple way to improve the overall SEO effect of your website is to add a footer with links to your important pages. The way the search engines pass link juice is a bit complicated, but I’ll try to simplify it a little bit for you. Let’s say you have a five page website with the following pages:

  • Home Page
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Sales Page
  • Another Sales Page

You know you want both of your sales pages and the home page indexed in the search engines. The home page will be indexed first because that’s what the search engines look for. But let’s say that your home page achieves a PageRank of 4. If you link to each of your other internal pages from the home page then each page linked to will receive 25% of that link love. This will be added to the love given to the individual page by the search engine spiders for a net effect.

If you want to increase the SEO love for one page over another then all you need to do is add a “nofollow” link to those links you consider less important. Let’s say you want more juice going to your sales pages. Just put “no follow” attributes in your links to the About Us and Contact Us pages and your two sales pages will then get 50% of the link juice from the home page while the two “no follow” pages will get 0%.

You may want your Contact Us page ranked and indexed because it has your address on it, and that’s fine. You have to decide which ones you want indexed and which ones you don’t care are indexed or not. But, back to the footer links.

Your footer links act the same way your navigation bar links do. You’ll get link juice for those so add links to your most important pages only – not the ones you don’t want indexed – and those links will pass link love on from each page where your footer is seen. Simple and very effective.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business, search engines | No Comments »

The Many, Many Ways To Build Links

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

There are links then there are links. Some links are good, some are better. Some aren’t worth anything at all. How do you tell the difference?

Some folks swear by paid links. But if Google thinks you’re buying links then you will have your links discounted and the person selling them to you will have his website’s PR taken away. Bad, bad Google!

Actually, that’s not a bad policy. People selling links for PR are attempting to influence search rank unfairly. That’s the reason for the penalty. It happens because most links are actually good links that benefit the websites linking to and being linked to. But how do you get them.? Well, let’s count the ways:

  • Reciprocal linking
  • Directory submissions
  • Write great content that people will freely want to link to
  • Engage in article marketing
  • Start a blog
  • Do some social networking
  • Social bookmarking

As you can see, you have some options. But which of these methods should you perform? The answer: All of them.

All of these are effective in building links, but you want to use a multi-layered strategy because if the search engines ever change their algorithms and the ways they count links then you want to have enough links from as many different types of sources available so that you decrease your chances of all of your links being discounted. Call it diversifying. Bottom line: It works.

Learn more about effective link building.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business, search engines | No Comments »

Two Types Of Link Popularity

Monday, July 7th, 2008

When it comes to link popularity there are two types of link popularity you should concern yourself with. The first type is pretty well known and most webmasters already know about it. The entire SEO community has built itself around this type of link popularity and many SEO businesses have survived as a result of it. It’s the type of link popularity that involves building inbound links from other websites back into yours. There are various methods of doing this and they’ve been covered to great depth on this blog and everywhere else, so I’m not going to talk about that type of link popularity today.

The second type of link popularity gets less airplay, but it’s not any less important. In fact, it’s equally important. This type of link popularity doesn’t have anything to do with inbound links or links from other websites and you have a lot more control over it as the webmaster of your company website. It’s internal link popularity.

What I’m referring to is the link popularity of the internal pages of your website as related to the link structure of your website as a whole. In other words, which pages and how many pages link to each page of your website? It’s important to think about this, not just for now but for the future as well.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to think about internal link popularity for a small site than it is for a large site. The way link juice works is like this: Your PageRank is divided among the pages that a particular page links out to. So if a page links out to 100 web pages and has a PR 5 then the link juice attributed to that link is divided among those 100 web pages. That means a page that links to 100 other web pages passes less link juice to each page than a web page that links to only 10 other web pages, no matter what the PR is. This is very important to keep in mind for your internal link structure.

Let’s say you have a web page that is rather old and has built up quite a bit of authority. Let’s say its PR6 is at least one point ahead of every other page on your website. You need to think carefully about which other pages you want that page to link to. You probably don’t want it to link to every other page on your website. You’ll want to be selective.

Here are a few tips to help you think about your internal link structure and decide which pages should link to which other pages on your site:

  • Include a nofollow attribute on links pointing to your About and Contact Us pages
  • Don’t include every page on your site navigation bar
  • Break your site down into tiers and only include tier 1 and 2 pages on the Nav Bar
  • Consider building separate navigation bars for sections of your website if those sections appeal to different target markets or if it makes sense to do so
  • Use in-text links to point to pages that might be relevant
  • Don’t link to every page from your index page and don’t include in-text links on your home page
  • Don’t overload your pages with too many links; this will create an effect of diminishing returns for all of your links

Internal link popularity is just as important as external link popularity. Use links judiciously and don’t just superfluously link to pages on your site thinking that will benefit you. It could hinder you.

Get more info on the 3 aspects of web development that are important for your business

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »

My Letter To A Spammer With A Lousy Offer

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

I got this e-mail the other day, another spammer looking for publicity:

Hello , I am Katherine Villete and I am writing to offer you my services. I have been a consistent blogger and I have learned that you have been looking for bloggers to make a review on your site. At present, I can offer my 130 blogs with different IPs, and all blogs are technorati claimed which can surely help you increase ranking in SERPs and increase your Technorati authority which is good in SEO. I will write you good and well-written reviews which will be composed of 150 to 200 words each review with 3 links with your keywords and image in each of the post. I will be creating 130 completely unique articles about your site. Also, if your interested on sitewide link then i have 10 PR6 blogs i can offer you. If your interested, please let me know. Katherine Villete ————————— reply with “remove me” and you will deleted to the mailing list.

First, Katherine, I didn’t ask you to e-mail me so you’re guilty of spam. That’s illegal. But aside from the obvious illegal aspects of this e-mail I’d like to address the offer.

I’m not sure where you learned that I was looking for bloggers. I have not been looking for people to review my site at all. I think, rather, that you just made it up. After all, you are a spammer and a lawbreaker so why should anyone believe you when you say “I have learned”? The fact is, I’m not looking for bloggers to review my site at all.

Wow, 130 blogs? You write that many? You must not have a life. It’s great, though, that they all have different IPs. That way, if I was interested in the unethical practice of paying for a positive review then it would be nice to know that these reviews didn’t sit side by side together on the same server so that Google would know that I’m not abiding by their guidelines. Oh, and you’ve claimed them all on Technorati? That’s an even better bonus. It would be nice to know that Technorati would see the links from your 130 blogs to mine and give me credit for those.

But I didn’t know that a higher Technorati authority was good for SEO. It might help, a little. But, honestly, the best SEO in the world is quality content every day and content on your blogs is not going to help my blogs a whole lot. Content on my blogs will help tremendously. As you can see, I post to my blog every day and it seems to be doing quite well on its own.

Your offer to write reviews of 150-200 words with three links and an image in each review is such a meager offer even though you don’t mention price. You see, I know that three links is no more valuable than one. Google isn’t going to give me link juice for all three links – it’s one of their spam control measures. They’ll give me credit for the first link and after that linking is beneficial only as a traffic-driving measure. How much traffic could I expect from your 130 blogs? You never tell me that.

Images won’t matter. They’re not crawlable. I’ll get no SEO benefit from the image. And what would it be anyway? A screenshot of my blog? No thanks. No benefit there.

Completely unique articles? That’s nice because you know that 130 articles that were exactly the same would be duplicate content articles and that wouldn’t help you much. I really couldn’t care less because 130 articles on your websites will only serve as content issues for you, not for me. Oh yeah, but you mentioned links, didn’t you? Only one per blog post and, yes, the fact that each article would be different from the next would help – as long as the search engines don’t discover that I paid for them.

Sitewide links? Besides the obvious grammar errors, which won’t look good for either of us if I decide to use your services (not likely), what do you mean by “sitewide links”? Are those links that point to every page on my site? And why do you offer 10 PR6 blogs? Since PageRank is almost useless as a measure of success now, it doesn’t really matter what your PR is. And if I’m supposed to be impress by your 10 PR6 sites then tell me what PR your other 130 are. If they are below PR5 then they won’t help a great deal because, as you can see, my website is a PR4. While links from PR3 sites might be OK, they are not going to be as powerful as links from a PR5 site nor will they be as powerful as links from sites that are within the same niche as mine. But you never tell me what kind of sites your 130 sites are, do you? Are they rubber manufacturing sites? Travel sites? General spam sites? If they are not Internet marketing site as mine is then they will be of very little value to me.

Katherine, I am not only NOT interested in your offer, but I would report you to Google if I knew which URLs to report. Your offer provides very little benefit to me and actually risks doing me harm if I were stupid enough to accept it. It looks like you’ll be looking for another sucker today. Good luck in finding one.

Sincerely,

Caroline Melberg
Chief Executive PITA (Pain In The A**)
Small Business Mavericks

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Posted in Blogging for Small Business, Networking for Small Business, PR for Small Business, SEO for Small Business, Small Business Internet Marketing | 6 Comments »