This is an amusing site: Preople.com. It lets you compare yourself against others to see who’s “more popular online”. Presumably it uses Google or another search engine to find how often the name you submit is referenced online. It seems that in my alter-ego of William Treloar I’m more popular than as simply Bill Treloar. So sad. Can it be there are other William Treloars out there? Scary thought. Anyway, have fun with this – how do you rank on the Internet?

Attorneys have a pending class action suit in Arkansas against Google, Yahoo!, Lycos, AskJeeves, FindWhat.com, Buena Vista Internet Group, LookSmart, America Online, Netscape and Time Warner. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of overcharging advertisers for pay-per-click advertising and concealing the overcharges.

In late April, Google implemented a long overdue update of the toolbar PageRank for many sites. If you’re using the free Google Toolbar, you can check your PageRank to see if you were affected. Google’s backlinks feature (the number of incoming links to your site Google shows under Site Information on the Google Toolbar) was also updated. Those backlinks still appear to be heavily filtered, though; Google shows only a small fraction of the links it has indexed.

While many sites saw a PageRank increase, some heavily over-optimized sites actually saw their PageRank drop significantly, in some cases all the way to zero. We believe this is because Google is being much more aggressive in detecting of what it considers to be artificial links structures.

Try not get too caught up in obsessing over your site’s PageRank. In general, sites with a higher PageRank will rank better, but not always. Google itself has said that toolbar PageRank differs from the actual PageRank Google uses to rank a site.

However, should one of your pages that previously enjoyed high PageRank suddenly drop to a PageRank of zero, then that’s worthy of concern. It probably means that the page has been assessed a serious penalty for violating one of Google’s guidelines.

Pay per click (PPC) advertisers on Google don’t just have their ads displayed on Google search results pages. Their ads also appear on many other web sites that have content related to the subject of the ad. For example, the Sports & Recreation page of East Hanover Online contains Google ads for summer camps and recreation centers. Whenever someone clicks on one of those ads, a portion of their per click rate is paid to the owner of East Hanover Online.

Now, India has spawned an innovative business called ad clicking fraud in which thousands of Indians are paid to click on a website’s Google ads in order to increase the website owner’s revenue from Google for each click. They offer 1,000 clicks per day in return for 50% of the money earned for those clicks.

A number of industry experts are concerned that if this fraud can’t be contained, it may  seriously jeopardize the future of PPC advertising, making high rankings in the natural listings even more important than they are today.

What makes one search engine better than another? Its ability to give us the most relevant results quickly. Now, a new meta-search engine has been designed to give us all the ability to rate the relevancy of the big four search engines.

Internet firm RustyBrick decided to build a white-labeled search engine that pulled results randomly from one of the major four search engines. Here’s their original proposal in the Search Engine Roundtable.

Basically, you do a search on RustySearch and then visit the top ten sites that come up. They will be from the top four search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves, but you won’t know which results came from which search engines. As you visit each site, you’ll be able to rank how well it relates to your intent for the search. Full instructions are here.

Have fun! And after you’ve done a few searches, you might want to see how the results are coming along. The official results are due on or about June 1, but preliminary results can be seen here.

Hint!

Yahoo seems to be edging out Google at the moment.

Until recently, large SEO firm SEOinc consistently ranked among the top two or three sites in Google for keywords like “search engine optimization” and “search engine positioning”. About a month ago, they suddenly vanished from the top 30, and they’re still not found today.

What did they do wrong?

According to Threadwatch and StepForth, Google got wise to their link-spamming strategies. According to Stepforth:

SEOinc had recently been embroiled in a link-trading controversy that started when a third party link-vendor sent several competing SEO/SEM firms a spam-email asking them to provide a link to SEOinc on their sites in exchange for a link to their sites from another, unnamed website. Aside from being a particularly un-tempting offer, many in the SEO community saw it as proof of what are perceived to be blatant link-spamming techniques designed to game Google’s rankings. SEOinc currently has 24,900 backlinks recognized by Google. By comparison, SubmitExpress, the number one listing under “search engine optimization” only has 4,580 backlinks recognized by Google.

This is exactly why we recommend (and practice) ethical link building efforts.

TIP
Ethical Link Building

When seeking links, always approach reputable web sites that are somehow related to yours. Explain to the web site owner how a link from their site to yours adds value for their visitors. Their site will be more valuable to someone visiting it because of the link from them to you. As long as that’s true, most web sites will link to you. And many will do so without requesting that you link back to them. This is sometimes called “organic link building”, and those links to you are there because the web site doing the linking thinks that you have a good and valuable web site. That’s exactly the kind of link the search engines love.

We’ve postulated in the past that links aren’t given their full weight immediately, and gain weight as they age. We’re seeing that with some of our clients. For example, Warwick Data Systems had their on-page relevancy optimized some time ago. At the beginning of 2005, their ranking for the very competitive keyword “used Cisco routers” was not in the top 100 in Yahoo. In March, they were at #27 and today they’re at #25. In Google, the change is even more noticeable, with an improvement of 24 positions from March to May. The only thing that really changed from January to March was link building. And I don’t think we added any links between March and May, so the continued improvement appears to be due to the links gaining weight with age.

According to the Seattle Times, 3/4 of US Internet users, or about 120 million people, have used search engines an average of 38 times a month. They report that as search has taken off, its influence has rippled through other industries.

It looks like Google is still the 500-ppound gorilla.

Google 44.5%

Yahoo 17.0%

MSN 10.9%

AOL 3.2%

Dogpile 0.8%

Ask Jeeves 0.9%

We’ve reported earlier on intelligence gleaned from Google’s patent application. Here’s some more stuff. It seems that Google might track how often users click on a page when it is listed in the search results pages. Google might also track the amount of time that users spend on that page or that web site.

It seems that Google might be tracking click-throughs (when people click on a listing in the search engine results to go to the listed web page) and rewarding those sites with higher click through rates.

Google may also plan to track the behavior of web surfers through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temporary files (possibly with the Google toolbar and the Google desktop search tool).

More specifically, it’s possible that Google might track the following information:

The number of searches over time is recorded and monitored for increases.

Information about a web page’s rankings are recorded and monitored for changes.

Click through rates may be monitored for changes in seasonality, fast increases, or other spike traffic.

Click through rates may be monitored for increase or decrease trends.

Click through rates may be monitored to find out if stale or fresh web pages are preferred for a search query.

Click through rates for web pages for a search term may be recorded.

Traffic to a web page may be recorded and monitored for changes.

User behavior on web pages may be captured and recorded for changes (for example the use of the back button etc.).

User behavior might also be monitored through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temporary files.

Bookmarks and favorites could be  monitored for both additions and deletions.

The overall user behavior for documents is monitored for trends.

The time a user spends on a web page might be used to indicate the quality and value of a web page.

What does this mean to your web site?

If Google really tracks the click-throughs to your web site from search engine results, you should make sure that your web pages have attractive titles so that web surfers click on them preferentially in the search results.

Make your web pages interesting enough so that web surfers stay some time on your web site. It might also help if you can entice visitors to your web site to add your web site to their bookmarks.

Make sure that your web page content is optimized for Google. The ranking factors mentioned in the patent specification are only additional factors. If your web page content is not optimized, all other ranking factors won’t help you much.