Initially I planned to name this post “Google changes in the algorithm to calculate PageRank”. However I decided to give it a more marketable name which will reflect more the “Consequences of the Google changes in the algorithm to calculate PageRank”. When I read in a Matt Cutts’s post blog post how Google changed the PageRank algorithm, it thought there will be some changes out there.

Before the algorithm was changed only the dofollow links were considered when the page rank was computed. Lets assume that a page of PR 6 contains 6 links of which 3 are dofollow and 3 are nofollow. Google would consider only the dofollow links when computing how much PR score will be passed by the dofollow links. That would be the PR / number of dofollow links. In our case it is 6 / 3 = 2. In reality not the entire points will be passed, some 10%-15% will be lost.

The new Google algorithm takes in consideration all the links, nofollow and dofollow when dividing the page rank of the source page. The points passed will be PR / (nofollow links + dofollow links). That would be 6 / 6 = 1(reduced to 85%-90% of course). Still the nofollowed pages will get no PR score nor anchor text relevance to the destination pages.

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Google Page Speed is a tool used internally by Google to optimize their webpages, which is now made available for the public. The tool is built as a Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug. When I discovered it I was a little amused that Google is using Firefox internally instead Chrome for such purposes.

Yesterday I just gave a try and Page Speed seems to be a really useful tool. To install the tool you have to open the Page Speed Download Page and install is as a Firefox Add-On(If you don’t have Firebug Add-On install it from here).

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I just read an interesting post about wordpress permalinks:
Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding Wordpress Permalinks. The post describe in details the speed problems which comes in wordpress when the Permalinks are activated.

The main issue is generate by the wordpress architecture. All the maps between the permalink url and the real items are kept in the database. When a webpage is displayed wordpress has to retrieve a number of items from the database equal to the number of internal links displayed in that page.

The solution proposed by the author is to use a permalink structure that does not start with a text based variable. In the same time he blames seo experts for teaching wrong tips and tricks.

Seo experts are seo experts. Usually they will teach you how to do push your pages up in the search engines. Optimizing your blog should be only the second priority. So you have to remember to use all the time some caching mechanism for wordpress, especially when you use permalinks. You can try WP-CACHE or WP Super Cache.

I think everybody knows what Google thinks about paid links(dofollow paid links because the nofollow links are accepted). They hate it for 2 reasons:

First of all they can not detect it, control it, measure it. The entire Google castle was built on the “measuring” what other pages “think” about a specific page. In simple words: back links. If links could be traded as any other resource the rich players will put lots of money in buying links. Google algorithms will be affected to some degree and the quality of the results will suffer.

The second reason for which Google don’t like it is the fact that their revenues might be affected. Most if not all the Google revenues are based on advertising. Google castle is build on the backlinks net foundation and powered by the ad marketplace they built. Content on web becomes more and more and grows much faster than the money spent on ads. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently read an interesting post on Tim Ferris Blog: Napolean on News and Information Management. It is a post about some of Napoleon’s quotes about managing information, and prioritizing tasks. It was really interesting because I was starting to ask myself a lot of questions after reading it. Maybe you’ll ask how come it is related to SEO? Actually it isn’t. But for every thing you try to achieve you need a strategy. SEO is no different than any other thing.

That’s why in this post I will try to apply “military” principles to practical SEO. First of all lets’ establish very clear what we want to achieve through. Lets define SEO as a set of actions we are going to perform in order to achieve the best results we can get based on what resourced we have. By resources we can understand our time, money or other people’s time and money which can be used in a seo campaign. The results of course should be increased number of visitors and better positions in search engines. Read the rest of this entry »

I created a few months ago a squidoo account to test squidoo and to try to get some strong lenses for a set of keywords I was targeting. For those of you who doesn’t know, Squidoo is a sort of combination between a knowledge base or a non-collaborative Wikipedia and a community site. In a few words everyone can create an account in a few minutes and start publishing whatever (s)he wants. In practice people uses squidoo a lot to create powerful pages from the seo point of view, pages which rank high on targeted keywords. Theoretically, those pages will pass link juice and traffic by embedding links to your site or can be used to promote affiliated products.

Personally, I think that in most of the cases creating content for other sites than your own is a bad idea in most of the cases, but I think that squidoo is really well done from the seo point of view and it worth to create a squidoo page(squidoo pages are named lenses) just to feel the taste, and to get an idea of what user experience means. Read the rest of this entry »

Google, Yahooo and Microsoft announced support for a new element that can be defined in the html head structure to avoid page duplication problems.  Any page can define an element like the following to indicate which is the real page(canonical page) the search engine should take in consideration:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/page.html”/>

The above element can be defined in pages like http://example.com/page.html?item=546345634 and has a similar effect with a 301 redirect, and can be used to indicate canonical pages inside the same domain. It can not be used to defined a canonical page ouside of current domains, but can define one in another subdomain of the same domain.

You can take a look on the following presentation.

Source: Matt Cuts Blog.

There are many popular Squidoo, Hubpages and “recently” launched Google Knol where everyone can join and publish their own content. Most of them are admirably built from the seo perspective and market themselves as communities of people with different passions, or alternatives to Wikipedia. In my opinion they are built with the intention to make their user to generate content optimized for search engines, not necessarily good content.

I’ve created 2-3 pages on squidoo and I’m very pleased by a health check they have there. It displays a few check points where you have to work on your article to improve it. All of the points are just the seo advices written in a language that someone who doesn’t know what seo is can understand.

In reality many people publish content there with the solely purpose to get some link juice to their own websites. I think this is an option but in 99% of the cases is one of the worth option. The first reason is that the page you publish in a website like squidoo will have have bigger chances to outrank your pages you want to promote this way, so first of all visitors will go to squidoo before coming to your site.

Another reason why you should take care when you publish content on other sites is that you’ll not be 100% control to that content. A blog post caught my attention regarding it: Be Careful with HubPages – Dofollow Nofollow Fraud. The author noticed that links in his pages on hubpages gets nofollw when he dosn’t log in in the hubpages account for a long time, and that this fact is not made public by hubpages.

I don’t think sites like hubpages, trying to reach the top of the search engines are purely evil. Everyone want to do it. However they have to do this by generating as much content they can, selecting good content and publishing new content all the time. And not always their goal is your goal.

So, I think you should take care before enriching other sites with your content, and remember that the content you put there might be yours, but the benefits you get from there are controled by them.

Google is changing at special events, celebrations, etc. a special image displayed instead of the usual logo. Today it was Charles Darwin’s 200th Birthday and the image was pointing to “charles darwin” results page. The fact I found interesting is that not all the google domains were displaying Charles Darwin google logo.

Initially, I thought it depends on time zone, but it seems not.  Google UK, Brazil, India have this logo:

while Google.com and Google.us displays the regular logo:

This difference might come from the evolutionst/creationist opinions and beliefs in different countries. How near is the day when google will localize their logo based on your profile and your own beliefs?

After I wrote this post I got the first comment from Bob (Texas). He has seen al the day the Darwin logo.  So the aparantly the logo is not displayed based on domain extension country or location. A possilbe explanation would be that the logo is not updated on all the google servers…

The end of year came with a google PR update. ImproveSeo.info increased its page rank from PR0 to PR3, and most of the sites I was handling increased their PR. I’ve seen forums discussions where people were mentioned their site PR went down, but my general impression is that most of the websites gained PR.

However PageRank represents only one from the 200 Seo Factors used by Google so you don’t have to rely only on it to appreciate how your site is going on. I’m happy with the PR improvement because I had some doubts and thought google simply devalues .info websites.