The Rank Magic Blog

How Popular Are You Online?
5/31/05
::: 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?

Click Fraud Class Action Lawsuit
5/23/05 ::: 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.

5/18/05 ::: 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.

Organized, Commercialized Click Fraud
5/17/05 :::
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.

Now You Can Help Rate Search Engine Relevance
Try Out Rusty Search
5/16/05 :::
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.
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SEO Firm Vanishes on Google!
The Result of Link Spamming?
5/12/05 ::: 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:
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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.
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Evidence: Links Gain Weight As They Age
5/9/05 ::: 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.

Search Technology Influence Spreads
5/3/05 ::: 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.

Which Search Engine Drives the Most Traffic to Business Sites?
5/2/05 ::: 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%

More Intelligence From the Google Patent Application
5/1/05 ::: 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.
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May
2005
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