Blog
(New Information Almost Daily)
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"Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clark, 1972
Rank Magic is a division of Treloar Associates. More information about Treloar Associates can be found at TreloarAssociates.com.
The Rank Magic BlogGoogle Plans Largest Solar-Powered Office in the USOctober 30, 2006 ::: Google Inc. plans a solar-powered electricity system at its Silicon Valley headquarters that will rank as the largest U.S. solar-powered corporate office complex. Google is about to build a rooftop solar-powered generation system at its Mountain View, California, headquarters capable of generating 1.6 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power 1,000 California homes.
Click DistanceOctober 26, 2006 ::: There are many factors that can influence the ranking of a web page on search engines. A factor that is overlooked by many webmasters is the click distance.
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October
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Click
distance is the number of clicks it takes to get to a web page from
the home page of your web site. If you need 5 clicks from your home
page to go to page A and 2 clicks from you home page to get to page B
then page B has a smaller click distance than page A.
Online
Click Fraud Proves Perilous
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Comments? If you'd like to contribute to the blog with an opinion, observation or question, please drop us an email |
Google Movies Lists Local Show Times
October 18, 2006 ::: Sometimes it seems like Google offers a new feature every couple of weeks. The latest is Google movies. Check it out!
The
"Google Guy" Talks About PageRank
October 15, 2006 ::: Matt Cutts is referred to as the "Google Guy" when he answers questions on Internet forums. He works at the Googleplex and in one of his latest blog posts, Matt Cutts wrote about Google's PageRank.
Here's the most important stuff he had to say:
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PageRank is not a number between 1 and 10. "It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar." The PageRank number that is displayed in the toolbar does not
influence the search results. |
The last statement is an important point. You have to work on all web page
elements to get good results. It doesn't help very much if you focus on a single
element.
Link building is very important, and we work hard on it, but it's not
the only important factor for search engine optimization.
Why We Use "Keyword Discovery"
October 13, 2006 ::: We've upgraded our
keyword research tool to a product that's significantly more expensive than what
we've been using. Why? Skewing of the keywords is why.
The best example of skewing with a free keyword tool like the one from from
Yahoo! is the term "Halloween Costume". If you started to build a site for your
Halloween Costume store back in February and started planning for your PPC
budget in February and you were utilizing the Yahoo!/Overture tool, you could be
highly disappointed come August, September and October. You will likely have
blown through your budget if you based it upon the search numbers from February
and March since no one is "searching" for Halloween Costumes at that time of
year. And if you're doing organic SEO like we do at Rank Magic, you'd
think that no one at all was searching for your products.
<More here, if you're interested.>
Google Aging Delay: The Mythical "Sandbox"
October 10, 2006 ::: Some words about the Google Sandbox. A reputed "purgatory" for new web sites where they have to bide their time before showing up in Google's results.
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Q. Our main web site has enjoyed good rankings in Google for
years. We've created a spin-off business with its own web site, which
we've optimized for the search engines just like our main web site.
However, after six months, the new site doesn't show up (not anywhere
in at least the top 120 pages!) for any of our keywords. Much less
relevant web sites rank much better. What gives? A. Well, if your new site is only six months old, you may still be the victim of the Google Sandbox. More correctly, we should call it the Google aging delay. According to current wisdom in the SEO community, the aging delay seems to average about 9 months, so you may need a little more patience. Submitting to Google isn't the answer. Your web site needs to build trust, links, and general credibility. And if you're in a particularly competitive arena, things can take awhile even without the aging delay. Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be quite such an aging factor in MSN, Yahoo, or the other major search engines. That's the general wisdom, but I have to admit that some of our clients that started with a brand new web site have shown up in Google within three months or less, so I'm not totally convinced the Google Sandbox is real. It may just be that it takes awhile to develop inbound links, and then it takes awhile for Google to recognize those links. And then, that recognition may not be factored into actual search results for awhile. All those "awhiles" add up. |
There's an interesting forum discussion on this at HighRankings.com.
Nigerian Scam: New Wrinkle
October 7, 2006 ::: You may be familiar with the Nigetian scam: Someone from a sub-Saharan African country send you an email claiming to be a surviving family member of some high ranking family, who has millions of dollars to transfer to a US bank in order to save it from confiscation by the new military government. For a percentage of those millions, he needs you to set up a bank account to receive the money, and pay several thousand dollars of "good faith money".
Well, it's not just an email scam anymore. This week I received a priority mail letter (through the actual Post Office) from the Netherlands. It was personally addressed to me, and was a classic Nigerian scam. There was no return address; just a yahoo email address to contact the person if I was greedy enough to fall for the pitch.
I found it rather amusing, but the fact that they're still doing this means there are still people falling for the con game. You can learn more about it here.
Vigilance!
Research: Paid Search vs Organic Search ROI
October 4, 2006 :::
According to InformationWeek, paid search (sponsored links or pay per
click (PPC) ads are not much better at turning shoppers to buyers. Contrary
to some other recent research showing a higher conversion rate of visitors
to buyers for organic search, this report seems to indicate the reverse,
although not by much.
"Keywords bought on a pay-per-click basis at search engines such as Google,
Yahoo and Microsoft MSN had a median conversion rate of 3.4 percent,
compared with 3.13 percent for unpaid results to search queries [...] Both
forms of search were far above the overall conversion rate of about 2
percent for most e-commerce sites. [...]
Most people don't understand that to get high conversion rates you need
multiple touch points. It's not just one or the other."
Click Fraud: The Dark Side of Online Advertising
October 2, 2006 ::: "Fleischmann [an online advertiser] is a victim of click fraud: a dizzying collection of scams and deceptions that inflate advertising bills for thousands of companies of all sizes. The spreading scourge poses the single biggest threat to the Internet's advertising gold mine and is the most nettlesome question facing Google and Yahoo, whose digital empires depend on all that gold." <read the full Business Week article here.>