Google PR Update hits with a bang

Google finally decided to throw webmasters a bone and updated the toolbar pagerank. After six months without it, the masses were growing restless. But what does it all mean?

NOTHING!

That being said, I'm glad it's here because I rely on the toolbar pagerank as one of the criteria used with SEO clients. While SERPs are more important to me (and my clients), if the clients don't see increased pagerank, they start to wonder about my abilities.

Just thought I'd share some of the success stories in my SEO journey, which only began six months ago (about the time of the previous toolbar update).

• My primary web design site is now a pagerank of 5. I only started serious SEO on it in May, so that's pretty good. What's even better is that I'm ranking in the top ten for about 15 good keywords.
• I have over 20 clients with sites that have a pagerank of 4. All of them rank in the top ten for their primary keywords (some less competitive than others).
• Over 100 of my clients have sites with pageranks of 3. Nearly all of them rank in the top ten for their keywords (some are still works in progress).

Considering that I'm a self-taught SEO guy who only even heard about SEO about a year ago, and that I only seriously starting performing SEO for pay about 6 months ago, that's pretty good. Yeah, I'm braggin' a little.

I've even started my own SEO website for beginners. I'm sharing some of what I've learned for beginners on the site, and even though it's still in it's infancy, I would love for anyone who wants to contribute articles to the site to do so. You can contact me through the site itself.

Is the concept of a "backlink snapshot" with Google a thing of the past?

I haven't been playing the SEO game very long. My first foray into the art came several years ago when I bought an SEO for Dummies book and the SEM for Dummies book. (my take - SEO for dummies is good to learn some basics while the SEM for dummies was directions on how to use websites, something I already know, and was worthless).

As I delved deeper into the ins and outs of optimizing a website, one of the things that nearly all SEO "experts" talked about was the "snapshot" of backlinks that Google took every quarter. It was these backlinks that supposedly made up the backbone of the next quarter's Pagerank. I've seen a lot of folks posting on blogs and message boards recently about the "snapshot" taken at the beginning of July 2007, and that this was the "big one" in preparation for the Quarter 3 toolbar update (which hasn't occurred yet, just like I predicted). So its something that at least some folks still believe.

It's all hogwash. Hooey. Bunk. BS.

Google has become a much more fluid machine, and even if they don't yet have a real-time "snapshot" of each website, the backlinks, rankings, etc. are updated weekly for new, lower ranked sites, and as often as hourly for more highly ranked pages. Heck, even the Google Watchdog blog that doesn't yet have any Pagerank on the toolbar can have a new post indexed in several hours. Things don't work the way they once did, and the backlink "snapshot" is among the things that just doesn't fit with Google's updated modus operandi.

I've had at least 3 backlink updates in my webmaster tools over the past 6-7 weeks, and the webmaster tools are notoriously behind on the backlink list. If this were the case, why would Google used some arbitrary date months in the past to gauge the worth of a site? The answer is that they wouldn't. It may be entirely possible that when doing a toolbar PR update, they take a "snapshot" one day and begin the update over the next week. But, that would be for purposes of showing a public number that may rise or fall over weeks and months behind the scenes and in the hidden depths of Google's servers.

I can't ever guess what goes on in the giant borg brain over at Google for sure, but I'm almost positive that the idea of a backlink "snapshot" is already archaic in the fast moving and quickly developing world of search engines and SEO. I haven't yet learned enough about SEO to consider myself an expert, but I'm pretty good at deductive logic, and its a fairly simple deduction to make that Google has abandoned the quarterly backlink "snapshot". They've moved past that to better techniques that work more closely to real time. And while Google is evolving, a lot of so-called SEO "experts" are not keeping up. I guess (hope) Natural Selection will weed them out.

Very funny Matt Cutts gag from my friend Dave at www.huomah.com

If the domain name is funny, then you know you're in for an f'ing treat! Check out the "Matt Cutts Link Spam Assassin" software over on Dave's blog:

Spam Assassin by Matt Cutts

Very funny stuff! Don't forget to check out his SEO Rants home page for some really good stuff. The current rant is entitled "Your SEO Sucks", and is a don't miss.

My on-page keyword optimization experiment

I recently decided to test some on-page optimization techniques to see how they affected my SERPs for an EXTREMELY competitive keyword (over 350,000 searches per month). A search for this particular keyword returns over a billion results (1.1 billion to be more exact). We'll call this keyword "foo mar shopping"

Before the experiment started, I was ranking about 600 in the world for "foo mar shopping". This number fluctuated between about 400 and 1000, but for the most part had settled into the 600 range. Not too bad for a competitive keyword that I hadn't optimized for at all.

Here's what I did on-page to optimize for the keyword. Most webmasters will recognize these techniques - they're strictly newbie level things.

• Added "foo mar shopping" to the front of my title tag.
• Rewrote my description META tag so that it included the keyword in it twice
• Also rewrote my keywords META tag so that it contained 4 variations of the keyword, including the actual keyword itself first in the list
• Added the keyword as the ALT tag on every image on the page
• Changed my style sheet so that H1 text showed up as only slightly larger than the other text, and bolded. I then added two separate column headers with the keyword using the H1 tag.
• I peppered my content with the keyword in a natural way. The keyword took up approximately 5% of my content.
• Where appropriate, I bolded, italicized, or underlined the keyword.
• All outbound links on the page had the "title" attribute added to the A tag with the title text being the exact keyword.
• I created an attractive bulleted list that was useful to the user and also included several variations of the keyword in the list items.
• On every page of my website, I linked back to the target page using the keyword as the anchor text.
  

So, I pulled some pretty uninventive tricks out of my bag. These are things that SEOers have been doing for years. My experiment was to see where my SERPs went for the keyword; I checked the results about every 3 days. Here are the results:

1. Day 3, first SERP check - ranking at about #500. Not significant because the normal SERP fluctuations had actually given me a higher ranking than this.
2. Day 7, 2nd SERP check - here's where the largest jump occurred. My Google SERP for the keyword jumped up to 110.
3. Day 9, 3rd SERP check - ranked #72 (yeah, broke that mystical "top 100" barrier"!)
   
4. Day 13, 4th SERP check - ranked #64
5. Day 15, 5th SERP check - ranked #74 (dropped here for some reason) {shrug}
6. Day 20, 6th SERP check - ranked #51
7. Day 25, 7th SERP check - ranked #49
8. Day 30, 8th SERP check - (this is today) ranked #39

The results themselves seem to suggest that correct on-page optimization can significantly help in raising the SERPs of an averagely ranked site. From #600 to #39 in one month is a pretty good result.

Just an FYI: this page only has a pagerank of 1, and I believe with some natural backlinking campaigns can be in the top ten for a keyword that is dominated by high pagerank websites.

Top Ten ways to help Google index your site

Occasionally, I will be posting webmaster tips. These are bits and pieces of knowledge that I've picked up myself over the years, and are by no means the "correct" way to do things. If you disagree with any of my top tens, let me know. :)

1. When I build a new site, I place a link to it's home page on one of my established sites (for example, my web design site). This might technically be in the grey area of Google guidelines, but it can often get new sites indexed in less than 24 hours (at least the home page). This also works for Yahoo, but seems to be less effective for MSN.
2. Put the site into your list of sites on the Google webmaster tools page. Then, add a sitemap and verify the site. I don't know if this will speed up the process, but it at least gives you a centralized area to manage the site.
3. Validate your code using a website validator at w3c.org. If there are problems with your HTML, search engine bots might have a hard time reading and indexing your page
4. Build a linking structure in such a way that all pages are within 2-3 clicks of each other. This makes it easier for the user to navigate and the search engines will also be able to find their way around.
5. In your linking structure, don't use "hidden" links that search engines can't follow. For example, Flash links, Javascript, etc. To check, hover over the link: if the link URL isn't shown in the browser's bottom pane, then a search engine may not be able to follow it.
6. Follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines when building the site. Nothing sucks worse than a site that's banned before it can even get off the ground.
7. Don't use black-hat SEO techniques
   
8. Choose your keywords carefully and don't "keyword stuff". If you have more than 15 or 20 keywords, you're probably stuffing. Some search engines don't care. Google does, so don't get penalized for that.
9. Make sure each page has a separate and distinct DESCRIPTION in your meta tags. The description should describe the page. Make sure to add keywords to your description in a natural way.
10. Make sure that the keywords in your KEYWORDS meta tag are different on each page, and that they adequately describe the page's main topics.

The most important is #1. Google puts a premium on links, and will index sites with good inbound links far faster than those without. If you notice, I didn't mention actually submitting the URL to Google. It's a waste of time - don't do it!