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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 marketingSearch Engine Panel’s New Theme
As alluded to in Sunday’s “Hectic Easter Weekend” post, I’ve been on the lookout for a fresh new template for SEP. This new theme, Bozzeny’s SIMSEK3C, was released just a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been busy customizing it for the past few days.
The main objective I sought to achieve revolved around more user-friendly sidebars. By editing the CSS file, some PHP modification (more on this below) and a 3-column design base, SEP now has flanking sidebars with nice section headings that really stand out.
Many changes were made to the original SIMSEC3C, but most notable are the fonts and colour. I’ve changed the fonts from the theme’s default “Trebuchet MS” to more readable Arials and Verdanas throughout the blog. The text in the top bar that lists SEP pages (Home, About, Lexi… - whoops, almost gave away our secret project) is now legible, instead of the tiny text in SIMSEC3C. Blues and a little bit of green was added to liven the theme up.
Tags: SEPA Rather Hectic Easter Weekend for SEP
I’ve learned over the weekend that migrating a blog to a new hosting service while being away from your computer is a recipe for disaster. You might have noticed some downtime here at SEP along with some strange error messages, and even non-existent RSS feeds! Not to worry though, as I’m now back at my computer and things are slowly returning to normal.
The downtime and strange error messages were a result of DNS propagation coupled with trying to add/modify new themes. I’ve browsed themes to the point where the Lorem Ipsum monster haunted me, but have yet to find a theme that fits just right. Chances are that I will be using a ready-made template and customizing it to my heart’s delight in the weeks ahead.
I hadn’t realized that my hungry subscribers were no longer being fed until I noticed a dramatic decrease in subscribers, or rather, until FeedBurner had issues grabbing my feed. It turns out that my .htaccess file disappeared while I transfered the blog over, which resulted in 404 error because www.SearchEnginePanel.com/feed/ didn’t exist. With any luck, this post will reach your favourite feed readers and inboxes shortly.
Tags: SEPEffectively Using Pay Per Click & Banner Adverts
Pay per click advertising has become a staple in most online advertising strategies over the past few years, with the growing use of search engines for looking up just about anything. All the while, banner advertising has been cast aside and deemed ineffective simply because no one clicks on them anymore. Unfortunately, the purpose of display advertising is misunderstood and its effectiveness undermined.
The fact is that banners can serve well in pushing a brand, product and service into a customer’s subconscious. Search marketers also seem to forget that display advertising existed long before the Internet was born, and the terms CPM, “above the fold”, etc all originate from the offline print world.
So let’s see how we can effectively integrate banner advertising with our beloved metric-centric (it rhymes!) pay per click campaigns.
Tags: display advertising, pay-per-click, reputation management, SEM, SEPJanuary 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