Google Updates Page Rank and Webmaster Center 1-29-08
The new year has started out with both Yahoo and Google making some significant changes to their indexes. 2007 ended with the normal year-end Google Dance and the SERP’s shuffling that we have all come to look forward to every holiday season. 2008 is starting out with some positives at least.
Google Page Rank Update January 2008
Last Thursday (1-24-08) saw a minor change in Page Rank for many sites. While domain level Page Rank remained the same on the 70 or so sites that I monitor daily, many of the internal Page Rank on pages changed, or was added. I have noticed that pages and especially blog posts that were created up to November 17th now have Page Rank.
I have a feeling that this is a new plan for Google, that they are going to be quicker about assigning Page Rank to internal pages than they have been in the past. In the Google Webmaster Center under Statistics > Crawl Stats you can see what your average Page Rank is, as well as Page Rank that has yet to be assigned:
The Page Rank not yet assigned was pretty much blank for all the sites that I noticed had gotten Page Rank updates on their pages. This is a good sign that Google is getting quicker with the PR updates. Usually the interior pages are updated along with the domains every 4 months or so. If they are doing them separately now, that will be good for Webmasters who rely on Page Rank to set the price for advertising on their sites.
Google Webmaster Center Gives You Control Over Site Links
When you do a search for a company or website, Google will put up what it feels are the most relevant in-site links. They have no given us a smattering of control over these Sitelinks.
In the Webmaster Center you can now block URL’s that you might not want to appear in the SERP’s. Under the Links tab there is now an option for Sitelinks:
Google explains Sitelinks as:
Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents.
Because we generate sitelinks dynamically, this list can change from time to time.
This is good news for sites that have pages they don’t want to appear in the SERP’s for a company search. I don’t know how comfortable I feel about having Google “block” anything, but you never know. The fact that they are working with us to give us more control over our sites and how they appear in Google, is a good sign.
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WordPress Blog Design
Blogs have come a long way in the last year or so. They are becoming integral parts of the Internet strategy for more mainstream businesses. Get Found Now has been developing custom WordPress systems, themes and plugins that are meant to give the search engines what they want to place sites highly, as well as to provide users with what they need to find what they are looking for on a web site.
The fact is, blogs are becoming core components to Internet Presence Management. This is most apparent in the Real Estate industry. All the major real estate informational sites like Inman and RIS Media are pushing blogging as the best means for agents and agencies to not only communicate with their prospective clients, but also as a way to get higher search engine placement.
If you are interested in either getting started with a blog, or making your existing blog better, than this is a good place to start. There are plenty of blogging systems out there that take care of web hosting, setup and configuration of blogs. Sites like Blogger and WordPress.com allow users to create blogs within minutes and all for free! While there are benefits to sites like Blogger (which is owned by Google), to achieve the best results, you need to have your own domain and control over every aspect of your blogging system.
Get Found Now has performed extensive testing on all the major blog service sites (Blogger, wordpress.com, etc.) as well as stand-alone blogging systems (WordPress, TypePad, etc.) and have found that the stand-alone systems not only rank higher, but get into the search engines much faster. While TypePad is a solid blogging system, we chose WordPress because of the superior support and myriad of plugin and theme options. WordPress has more options and is widely supported. If you are a TypePad user, you will still find these series of articles useful because the theory behind the technology and strategy for blogging can be applied to TypePad, we do have a lot more support for WordPress so if you are making a choice now, stick with WordPress.
WordPress Blog Design Services
When designing a blogging system, there are a lot of options. The most important thing about blogs is the content. The way that WordPress delivers your content is what separates it from other content management systems and gives it the upper hand in the SERP’s.
The actual look and navigation of the blog is handled by the theme. Get Found Now uses custom themes that are the best of both worlds:
- Website Usability- if users can’t find what they are looking for than your site won’t convert any of its traffic. By using deep link navigation your visitors will always know where they are on your site.
- SEO Ready - if your site isn’t ranking for your keywords than nobody will be able to find it!
This new series will take a look at every aspect of blog design from install to plugins and theme customization. Please leave questions as comments so I can answer them for everyone. For more information and to see samples of our work visit our WordPress Blog Design page.
Google Webmaster Center Adds Content Analysis and Sitemap Details
Google has added some great new features to their Webmaster Center. If you don’t use Google’s Webmaster Center and you care about your search engine placement, then you are missing the boat. For a detailed look at Google’s Webmaster Center read my post “Google Webmaster Center Updates ” from September 07.
Google actually is now pointing out things about your site that it doesn’t like. You can probably assume that these would be the same things that Yahoo and ASK don’t like about your site as well. I think it is mighty nice of Google to take the time to actually help us improve our rankings rather then taking away marketing tools like text ads!
Google Webmaster Center Content Analysis Tool
The new tool can be found in the Diagnostics part of the Webmaster Center. The graphic below will show you the main parts of their Webmaster Center:
The Content analysis shows you three things that you need to know about your site:
- Meta Title - how is your title tag? Is it too long, too short, make sense? These questions and many more are answered for you by Google.
- Non-Index-able Content - this is pretty cool as it will point out to you the stuff on your site that Google can’t spider. Things like flash or script-laden pages, also images that have no “alt” tags. This is important now that everyone is using video. Google also has a new Video Sitemap that you can use to properly index your video content.
- Meta Tag Issues - this tool focuses on the meta description which is very important for you to be able to control the description that appears for your pages within Google’s SERP’s.
The graphic below shows an example of what the Title tag and Meta Descriptions look like:
By using these tools you won’t automatically jump to the top of the ranks, but they will help you get your site tuned up and as good as it can be in the eyes of Googlebot. The graphic below gives you a look at the non-index-able content section.
I highly recommend to all webmasters that they take advantage of these and all the powerful tools that Google is giving you.
Google Webmaster Center Sitemap Details
I surely hope that all of you avail yourselves of XML sitemaps. XML is probably the most significant programming language to a webmaster that wants search engine placement. Both XML sitemaps and XML-RPC are a gateway to higher rankings, especially within Google. Read my post Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing for more info on these tools.
Google’s Webmaster Center was initially built for site owners and optimizers to submit XML Sitemaps. It is great that they are continuing to add more and more tools to help us out, and the new Sitemap Details is a nice add-on. Below is a snap-shot of the Sitemap Details section:
While it is true that the URL’s submitted in your Sitemap don’t necessarily reflect all the URL’s that are in Google’s index, it is better than doing a site: search.
Google also added a couple of new languages for those of you that don’t like English. I got the graphics from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.
Live Search Webmaster Center Open To Public
Get Found Now has been Live Search Webmaster Center beta testers since it began. We have been using the system for a while and are ready to fill our readers in on how it works. Much like Google’s Webmaster Center, Live’s Portal gives you a lot of insight into your website, at least how it is perceived by Live. If you aren’t using it, you should be. You can access it here. You will need a Microsoft Passport or ID to set up your websites and access the portal.
While most people focus on Google optimization first, then Yahoo, Live is still accounting for around 10% of all searches on the Internet. Get Found Now has about the same placement for our primary keywords in all 4 of the major search engines (I include ASK as a major search engine), but my traffic is different than the percentages of searches that are tracked by places like Nielsen Net Ratings. If you follow those things, then you know that it is estimated that Google gets around 50% of all searches in the US. comScore released its ranking looking at August and September of 2007. They are saying that in the US Google has a 57%, Yahoo 23%, Live 10% and ASK at 4.5%. With ASK being the exception ALL major search engines saw a decline in activity.
Looking at the numbers above you would think that the traffic would have a similar pattern, but my traffic for keywords related to social network marketing, Web 2., online marketing, etc. are actually quite different. I get 70% of all my visitors from Google, with Live being next at 15%. ASK and Yahoo are about the same with around 5%. The rest of my traffic comes from other sites. Now this does not take into consideration RSS. People that visit my blog by clicking on a link within an RSS feed account for more traffic than anything except for pure Google searches. My blog actually has almost an equal amount of entries as does my home page. My point here is that you can’t ignore Live and that using their Webmaster Center is a good idea and worth your time.
Next week I am going to do an overview of Live’s Webmaster Center with a walk through of its features like my Google Webmaster Center Updates post.
If you are interested in the search engine rankings below is a snapshot of the ComScore’s QSearch Search Engine Share.
