Google is the most widely used search engine, so when you practice optimization, you really want to do it with an eye toward how you’re site will rank in Google. If you can rank high for your site’s keywords in a Google search, the other search engines will generally take notice and rank your site high, too. The beauty of it is that the good search engine optimization that will help you rank in Google will also boost your rankings in Yahoo!, Bing and other search engines.

How do you use SEO to make sure searchers can find your site? Keywords. If you wrote a long article about apples, but only used the word “apples” once or twice and instead kept calling apples “fruit,” you’d probably rank much higher for the keyword “fruit” than you would for the keyword “apples.” And that’s unfortunate, if you’d really like to attract people who are Googling “apples.”

Think of the people who will find your site useful. What will they be searching for? Make sure you’re using those keywords in your content, your page titles, your post titles and tags, and you’re already making huge improvements in your on-site search engine optimization.

You can also optimize your site on the fly by adding content that targets certain keywords that are actively being searched right now. How do you know what people are searching for? Google Trends is a tool that you can use to see the top searched terms over the last 24 hours.

Google Trends lets you see the top 10 searched terms or phrases. And you can type in two different keywords or phrases and compare them to see which is searched more. This can be really valuable for someone who wants to know which keyword can better benefit a site.

When you enter the terms to compare, Google Trends gives you a handy graph showing the searches for both terms, color-coded and compared, for the last 5 years. This not only shows you which is the more searched term, it shows you trends over a long-term period.

Google Trends has another fun and helpful feature, too. Google Hot Trends lets you see the top 100 most searched terms over the last 24 hours. For some it’s just a point of interest to see what people are looking up, but for a website owner working on driving traffic, Google Trends can be an invaluable tool in the SEO toolbox.

The ability to quickly compare keywords and see what people are using Google for that day can really help you tweak your search engine optimization and get that traffic to your website.

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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.

Obviously this move will produce big movements for most of the pages on the web. If this is the only change in the algorithm most of the pages will lose from their page rank even if they don’t contain nofollow links. After all the PR of a page is built based on incoming links. If the pages containing the back links will lose PR the destination page will lose it as well.

People used to play with nofollow/dofollow links in order to direct the page rank points(the term of link juice is also used here) to certain pages. For example wordpress plugins make the links to categories and tags pages nofollows, many sites are through this method to send the link juice to strong pages. This term is called PageRank sculpting.

Before seeing which are the sites will be most disadvantaged by this move, lets say that page rank is just one of the many factors used by google to decide which are the best results for what you are looking for. A lowered PR does not necessarily means less visitors sent by search engines.

The most affected sites are of course sites containing nofollow links. Right now I’m thinking to the following categories:

• sites based on user generated content – digg, twitter, youtube clones and many many more. Lots of web 2.0 sites contains no follow links and user generated content
• wikipedia – maybe I should put it in the above category, but since for many keywords wikipedia is the first result I wanted to put it separately. Wikipedia pages contains a list of external links at the end.
• forums – many forums shows the links from posts as no follow in order to avoid spam
• blogs – most of the blogs have no follow link comments.

Then it comes the second category of pages, which used to have their PR built by the dofollow links from the sites from the above categories. However the first 3 categories should be excluded, because they have most of the links as nofollow, they don’t really pass page rank points. The only remaining category is represented by the blogs with their in text or in context dofollow links. Since they have lots of comments the pages will lose their PR and consequently will pass less.

Unfortunatelly, Matt does not specify when this change was done. I don’t think the current PRs reflect it, but I assume the next PR change will bring some big changes.

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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).

Once installed open a webpage and go to Tools > Firebug > Open Firebug. You’ll notice a Page Speed tab in the Firebug panel. Inside that tab click Analyze Performance button:

You’ll get a nice report with all the things that can be improved:

Here are some of the tips provided by Page Speed:

• Compress images and show you how much you gain from that. You can just save the images and use them. It also gives a resized version of the images to the dimensions used in the page.
• Compress Javascript files.
• minimize DNS lookups
• put the static content to a cookieless domain.
• Combine Javascript and css files
• distribute resources on multiple domains to enable parallel downloads.

Some of the things are easy to implement, some of them requires advanced configurations(adding a cookieless domain). Anyway Google Page seems to be a really nice tool, in future post I’ll try to explain how to implement some of the tips.

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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.

More and more people will be tempted to sell ads when they will realize that a sold link might bring more money than an embedded ad unit. On the other side people will realize that a paid link is not bringing only new visitors but an improved search engine position.

I’m sure that if there would not be the terrible punishment of losing the place in the eternal Google index the link trading would flourish. Let’s try to imagine how the world would be if the link trading would be “legal”. First of all lets assume big players will put their money in paid links and will reach the sky in SERP pages. A new job will appear called SEO profession(wait this job already exists). The site owners selling links will have more money; they will also buy links to promote their websites.

The question to be asked is “Would the paid links affect the quality of search?”. Somehow when we think about paid search we think that bad sites will reach the top just because they afford to buy more links. How is that different of what happens today? Bad sites can pay good SEO professionals to push them in the top. It’s more probable to reach the top of the engines with good SEO than with good quality.

Google already have some powerfull algorithms and it can measure and control what’s happening on web right now. Why to make the web to play by your own rules and not leave it free to control and regulate itself? The response is obvious, but is it profitable also on long term? It’s not a bet agains future, to freeze or to force the market in the direction you want, instead of adapting yourself for the market changes? How long the little site owner will agree to make 50$ a month from adsense when he can make those money from selling 2 links?

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<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.

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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…

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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.

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The interesting fact is that net applications analyzing software is able to detect the Windows 7 operation system which is internally used by Microsoft, and they can detect most of the falvor for unix and linux operating systems. There are a few scenarios available:

• Google is working secretly on an operation system, which is used internally for testing purposes.
• Google is using a spider which does not provide the operation system information.
• Traffic comes from Android phones distributed by google to its employees.
• Google is using a proxy to cloak some data.

The amount of traffic varies between 11% and 30% of the total google traffic which seems too big to come from androids phones and too small to be crawler. Further more the Net Applications exclude the possibility of having the traffic coming from a crawler.

Future is close, and we’ll see if google prepares a operating system.

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I think the launch of Google Search-Based Keywords tool is a clever move Google has made in a time when a fierce competition will increase in shrinking market. It’s the reaction to the recession, providing an easy tool which will improve the financial results of ad publishers. The tool is easy to use and shows the most profitable way to develop content for site owners.

The main category of sites having to gain from this tool are the small niche sites with little content. Large sites already had specialized people to target and optimize the content for specific keywords. Further more large sites are difficult to be targeted on specific niches. As an indirect result the advertisers will be able to buy cheaper ads on niche sites, more content being generated for high paying niches. Considering that blogs are niche sites they will have more to gain from this move, or better said less to lose.

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On google webmaster blog there in a post called Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs google stated that they prefer dynamic urls to static and that url rewriting should be avoided:

“Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. ”

In my opinion that’s a big change, but this announcement did not have many follow ups in seo blogs and forums. I know that the change of the search engine algorithms is a part of the seo game, so I wasn’t concerned about it.

A few days ago they released on the same google webmaster blog the Google Seo Starter Guide was released, being noticed blogs and social media. It’s pdf containing a set of google guidelines and recommendations to help webmasters to optimize their site for search engine and to improve the site usability for their visitors. One of them attracted my attention:

“Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, “friendlier” URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

…

Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they’re quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help. Some webmasters try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URLs to static ones; while Google is fine with this, we’d like to note that this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues with your site.”

and a few recommendations:

• Use words in URLs
• Create a simple directory structure – Use a directory structure that organizes your content
  well and is easy for visitors to know where they’re at on your site. Try using your directory
  structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.

First of all I’m sure that having friendly URLs is good not only good for search engines but it’s good for your visitors as well. My questions is why would release google 2 contradictory recommendations, and for the moment I’m not able to figure it.

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