Posted on Jun 24, 2009
According to Matt Cutts, PageRank sculpting is now dead and has been for some time; people simply didn’t notice the change in Pagerank designation that Google secretly made sometime ago in 2008.
At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t.
Classic PageRank (ignoring the decay flow factor of 10-15%) was seen like this: a site with “10 PageRank points” and 10 outgoing links (5 of which are nofollow) will give each link without nofollow 2 PageRank points. However, now a site with the same structure will only give each of the links without nofollow 1 PageRank point. Links with the nofollow attribute are designated their respectful PageRank, but when the times comes to assign it, this PageRank simply disappears.
What does this mean for webmasters? Matt Cutts suggests that you let PageRank flow freely throughout your website; I agree with him to an extent, but I think that people will still try to PageRank sculpt in a new way. This new PageRank sculpting will encourage webmasters to reduce the number of links on a webpage or hide these links away from getting PageRank by using iframes or other techniques to ensure that the other links on this webpage get the maximum flow of PageRank. Some webmasters might even consider removing comments on their blogs because all of the links from comments is destroying their PageRank flow throughout their websites.
PageRank is clearly a much more complex topic than this. For instance, link placement on a webpage affects the authority it is rewarded; a navigational sidebar link is going to be designated less PageRank that an in context link. Time will tell if people start this new PageRank sculpting, but I doubt it will be beneficial for the time it takes to implement and its implementation will likely make a website awkward. If it does become a new practice to optimize websites, one thing I believe is that Google will pickup on this and change their algorithms accordingly.
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Posted on Jun 22, 2009
Ideally, you would like to have the (non-hyphenated) .com, but sometimes that is not an option as the .com is already a preexisting website or it is out of your budget. Many webmasters are now needing to decide between the hyphenated .com vs. the non-hyphenated .net for their websites because the .com has already been taken. Keyword1-keyword2.com and keyword1keyword2.net are the same from a seo point of view; however, these domains are different from a user standpoint. The hyphenated .com and the .net will both give the non-hyphenated .com type in, direct, traffic because users generally forget the existence of hyphens in domains and default to the .com extension. Instead of choosing between these two domains, I would recommend buying both of them and 301 redirecting the undeveloped domain to the developed website. Remember that the .net and the hyphenated .com are viewed the same by search engines, so you should develop the domain that sounds, flows better, or is more memorable. After you have chosen which domain to develop, emphasize the hyphen or the .net in the banners or other images that include the domain, so that less traffic is funneled off to the .com. .nets and hyphenated .coms are becoming popular because the non-hyphenated .coms are all taken; instead of choosing between the two alternatives to the .com, get both and develop the more brandable domain.
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Posted on Jun 18, 2009
It is still quite early, but Microsoft’s Bing has had a second good week according to ComScore:
Bing has gained 3% of the search engine market share for Microsoft compared to where they were at pre-Bing, regarding number of searchers and total number of queries. “It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” said Mike Hurt, ComScore senior vice president. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.” Bing has held strong for 2 weeks, but the true question is will this gain in market share stick or will is fade away.
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