seo blog

With the Google PageRank finally complete, you can see the fruits of all your hard work on optimising your site for search engines. Though sometimes the fruit does look all the great.

If you are seeing an increase in your site’s PR, it doesn’t mean that you will see an immediate increase in the amount of traffic from Google nor see high listings in the search results. A lot of people think this and are disappointed when the see neither happening.

To explain a little… a site’s PR is continually being reviewed and calculated by Google, but they only show a public update once every so often.

As a small inspirational push - keep at your search engine optimisation and check for increased traffic and listing position more often as it won’t coincide with the PR update.

Google has recently launched a customisable search engine and it can be plugged into your site too.

There are a number of tools that you can use to generate code for adding a search box and the results to your site. The look and feel can be adjusted to match you site colours too. Adding this Google search engine to your site is a great way to add a search feature to your site. I have tested it out in my directory.

Another great feature is that you can add exactly what sites you would like your search engine to source the results from. You can then keep to a specific topic and use only sites on that topic.

You can also plug your Adsense account details into the search engine and earn revenue from ad clicks… thanks Google for sharing the love!

Word on the street is that Google is in the process of updating PageRank. Thanks for pointing it out Nick…

For those of you who still believe in PR, I usually check out future PageRank at SEOchat. Usually people say that PR is worthless when they don’t see an increase in their sites! … only kidding …

I just noticed Google has a new Adsense format. This is a great new addition and I think that it is about time. With ISP’s providing high connection speeds and limits, this form of media shouldn’t pose any problems. The nice thing that I like about this advert style is that you can choose whether to watch it or not!

Sample video ad here…

The only issue at this stage for Google is that their video advertisements reserves are low and therefore you may not see a video ad for a little while…

Just testing…

After having a look at some of the new features added to Google’s webmaster tools, I would recommend having a look (if you haven’t already)! There are some useful features and interesting stats for your site. One of my favourite was the info on the page with the highest PageRank (it wasn’t what I thought it would be).

You have to obviously varify that the site you want to check is in fact yours, but once you have completed varification you can view reports on web crawl errors, analyse your robots.txt file, view statistics on queries and crawls, and more. Don’t forget that this is also the area where you can submit your sitemap file too.

There is another feature that I thought was rather nice. This was the one that allowed one to decide how to index their domain - with or without the www. I wonder if this will affect the PageRank by forcing all traffic to go to your preferred URL format? I guess someone will have to test it and let us know.

Finally… I have been waiting for this Google PageRank update and it has finally shown some great results for me.

I was happy to see that my directory categories all got PR4 and sub categories got PR3. Most of the site’s details pages that where on the home page also got PR4 which was great for those sites! Just a quick promo for the front page…

I haven’t been as excited as previous updates (well not for a while now), and the reason is that PageRank seems to be losing it’s flavour (still very popular don’t get me wrong), but many SEO consultants don’t value it as it once was. I have read in many places that it is not that important anymore. I still think it plays a big role in the SEO industry though, maybe as a marketing tool.

Something on the horizon though is Page Strength, and it seems to be catching on. Some critics say that it still needs to be tweaked a little, but I think that it gives a slightly wider picture of the value of any web page. The Page Strength tool was created by Matt Inman and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. Give it a test run!

There are a few areas that I think may not be too relavent for some sites like links from .gov and .edu TLDs and links found in Wikipedia. It also seems to use a lot of Yahoo results. Maybe it would be better if it could use a combination of search engine results? This tool is meant to give you a snapshot along with details. Great work guys!

Will Page Strength be the new PageRank?