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April 2008 PageRank Update and VisualRank
Google datacenters have been busy the past couple of days as they were updating toolbar PageRanks (TBPR) across the board. The last complete PageRank update was in late February. SearchEnginePanel.com maintained its PR2 since getting ranked, and is now up to PR3 from this latest update. I’m attributing the small step to writing fresh unique content coupled with promotion through social media, and some of you may have noticed our posts in StumbleUpon or Digg.
More Google News
Coming soon (or perhaps not so soon) to a Google near you - VisualRank. As the name implies, VisualRank will be the image-equivalent of PageRank for web pages. Images will begin to be weighed and ranked just as pages have, but I doubt it will have much of an effect on image search traffic. After all, PageRank is only a mediocre measurement of a page’s link building initiatives, and is far from being a strong indicator of SERP ranking.
More SEP News
During the announcement of our latest theme in late March, we hinted that we had a little project underway. Well, here it is. We’ve recently added a lexicon to our blog to help decipher some of the more cryptic search marketing acronyms and some general search marketing terms. The list will never be exhaustive, but it will be kept updated to contain the more relevant terms in the industry. So for you loyal SEP subscribers that get our feed through email or a feed reader, stop on by to our Lexicon page and brush up on your vocabulary! 
And Speaking of Subscribers…
Some of you may have noticed that our subscriber count dropped from the 60-70 range to the low 40s a couple of weeks ago. I was curious as to how many actual subscribed readers there are of SEP, and decided to purge the email list of non-readers. Basically, I emailed everyone and told them to reply if they wanted to keep their subscription. So even though the subscriber count is hovering around 40 right now (with only 20-30% being from email), it’s a much more accurate depiction of true human readership.
Tags: Google, link building, PageRank, search traffic, SEP, social media marketingIndex and Root Pages Merged by Google
It’s taken awhile, but Google has finally merged the index page with the root page of a domain as long as the content was the same. That is, Google now interprets www.abc.com and its counterpart www.abc.com/index.html to be one page, rather than two separate pages. For you PageRank fanatics, this does implicitly mean that PageRank won’t be split amongst the two pages.
The merging could be the result of the duplicate content filter going to work, but for now there hasn’t been any official comment on the matter.
Inadvertently creating duplicate content through the naming structure of a website has always been an issue, and SEOs have had to carefully handle these situations with whatever they might have in their toolkit. Apache mod_rewrites come into play here, alongside careful inspections of how you link to your internal pages.
So, I don’t have to worry about all of this anymore, right? Wrong.
Tags: Google, PageRank, toolsHTTP 301 Permanent Redirect Codes
Every now and again you’ll find yourself in a situation where the naming structure of your pages will change, and even changes in the domain itself. If those changes are occurring to high authority pages, then it’s vital that you properly redirect the old domain/pages such that the new website receives and carries the same authority and PageRank.
For permanent redirection, an HTTP 301 redirect needs to be used. The 301 redirect will properly pass any link juice (authority) as well as instantly redirect user agents to the new website. Visitors, spiders and the like won’t need to click any link or wait for the redirect at all.
The other benefit to a permanent 301 redirect is its ability to keep your site’s search engine rankings. Usually, a 301 redirect will (relatively) instantly have the new domain/website indexed and ranked, while still displaying any old URLs in the main index. These old URLs normally get dropped in under a year, and the time-frame has been getting shorter and shorter.
Tags: code, PageRank, SEOFlickr Begins To Nofollow Outgoing Links
After a nice little run by black-hat and grey-hat SEOs, Yahoo’s free photo hosting website Flickr has begun to take a stand. In the past week, Flickr has started to apply the nofollow attribute to comments on photos and even to links from photo descriptions.
Prior to this change, blackhats and greyhats had two main ways to steal link juice from Flickr: photo captions and; comments. The former wasn’t too big of a problem, but the latter was prone to abuse because it was so easy. Flickr users would often neglect to moderate comments on their pictures or even be aware that a comment was posted to something they uploaded.
Tags: PageRank, SEO, YahooJanuary 2008 Google PageRank Update
When I first heard about Google updating pageranks (PR) in the past few days, I figured it was just another slap on the wrist for pagerank manipulators, rather than a complete pagerank update of all sites. Upon checking across multiple datacenters, it was indeed true that a full update was taking place.
This comes as a surprise (at least to myself), seeing as the last full pagerank update took six months or so. In addition, there have been a handful of smaller PR updates in the past few months, intended to penalize those engaging in the buying and selling of pagerank (aka, “link juice”).
Tags: Google, PageRank, SEP