I just watched two videos by Rand Fishkin regarding Google's PageRank, and I think that these are easily the most succinct education about Google's Pagerank that I have seen in quite a while.

The first video, What's PageRank Got to do With It?, describes how Google uses PageRank for:
1. Crawling - How Google's spider determins what to crawl.
2. Inclusion - Divided into 2 pieces, importance and uniqueness
3. Freshness - How often content is updated, and therefore how often to re-crawl a page.
4. Ranking - how pages in Google's index are ranked.

IMO, the important comment to draw from Rand's video is that #4, Ranking, may be the least important function of PageRank, especially when anchor text, link quality, link source, etc are becoming less important or trustworth.

After the helpful education session, we can move on to Rand's next post, Whiteboard Friday - PageRank Part II.  Here's the information that you will find really useful, because Rand goes into how PageRank can help you optimize your site better.  So, rather than trying to translate the video, watch it for yourself:


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - PageRank Part II from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Max Kalehoff post SEO Spammers Are Corrupting The Social Media Commons in the Online Spin section for MediaPost suggests that 

"...all the businesses that blindly hire such SEO spammers should be held accountable. Businesses and affiliate marketers that turn a blind eye or knowingly fund such practices are nothing more than enablers. They should also be blacklisted in a universal database. They’re corrupting our social media commons."

Wow, a harsh judgment to be sure, although it may not bee too off base.  But where is the line?  Just read the few comments already posted to Max's blog and you'll see that, although they agree, most people consider any form of regulation to be a slippery slope.

I've seen the same thing in the blogs that I have managed in the past.  It's been increasingly common to see a quick "great idea" or "you hit the nail on the head" comments to a posting, and then see anchor text and a link in the signature line that greatly outweighs the actual comment.


IMO, blogs are already set up to self-regulate.  Moderate your comments, delete spam, and keep quality comments.  Sure, some bloggers may whine about the added time and effort that it takes to regulate your comments and weed out the crap spammers are posting, but what's the saying... "No pain, no gain."


(By the way, this IS a blog, and I DO accept comments.  I am not suggesting anything that I myself am not willing to be a part of).



What do you think?  Is social media corrupted by spam? What should be done?  All comments are welcomed.  Even if all you say is, "great idea!"

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Matt McGee at SearchEngineLand.com recently posted Study: Fortune 500 Doesn’t Get SEO.  The report suggests that a majority of Fortune 500 companies rank extremely poor in natural search for keywords that they heavily advertise on. 

"With very few exceptions our research found that Fortune 500 companies are doing an extraordinarily poor job of ensuring that their ‘money’ keywords are even moderately well represented in natural search."
- Natural Search Trends of the Fortune 500 Q3-2008, by Conductor, Inc.

Does this mean small and mid-sized companies have found a way to compete with - and outperform - the corporate giants?  In fact, the internet has leveled the playing field for companies of all sizes has been around for over a decade.  Many have considered natural search as the great equalizer for years, also.

But consider this: poor performance displayed by these large, sucessful companies is not necessarily due to incompetence.  I can think of one specific reasons that may explain the lack of visibility among large companies: lack of trying.

IMO, there is room for interpretation because of the 'money' keywords this report focuses on.  Forture 500 companies are spending money on these keywords with excellent results using search engine marketing, which provides much more controllable, trackable, and immediate results than natural search. 

And that would mean only one thing. Beware small and mid-sized compaines.  Once the Fortune 500 underperformers wake up and reach into their wallets to allocate the funds and resources to natural search optimization, we all may catch it right in the SERP.

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I taken on some new SEO efforts for three websites, and have two other sites that were built specifically for SEO within the last few months that I will begin working on soon.  Getting Google Sitelinks for each of these sites has always been a line item on my goal list.

Let me apply a disclaimer here: Although Sitelinks are on my SEO tasklist, Sitelinks do not affect your rankings in the search engines.  I am including it with my SEO efforts due to an assumption based on these givens:
1. Sitelinks are generated according to a Google algorithm when your site is spidered.
2. Google evaluates websites according to their perceived relevance to consumers.
3. SEO is all about showing the spiders how your site is relevant, and what keywords it is relevant for.

 So IMO, it's only natural to assume that a well SEO'd site has an increased chance of being rewarded with Google Sitelinks. That aside, I wanted them for the added access, usability and convenience for web visitors, and because Sitelinks make your listing stand out from all of the other results on the SERP.

So when I came in the office this past Tuesday and saw that Google had generated Sitelinks for one of my domains, I was thrilled... and perplexed  The site that is the newest domain and least optimized website for SEO within this current effort.  And the question that came to mind is this: Why does the Google algorithm to apply Sitelinks to some domains and not to others?

Cristian Mezei has compiled an excellent list of potential Google Sitelink triggers at SEOPedia.org about his testing methods and hypothesis on what does and does not affect Google Sitelinks for a domain.  Google only provides a bare bones description at How can I see links to my site?  (I can't imagine anyone answering "yes" to the 'was this information helpful' question.) 

Overall, there's little out there other than theories about Google Sitelinks.  But there's a little hope.  In a blog posting called Information about Sitelinks, Google says

Our process for generating Sitelinks is completely automated. We show them when we think they'll be most useful to searchers, saving them time from hunting through web pages to find the information they are looking for. Over time, we may look for ways to incorporate input from webmasters too.

IMO, it's time.

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