Most AdWords-like systems operate on the same principle:

1. You choose a set of keywords and phrases.
2. You create one or more adverts, normally in plain text.
3. You opt to pay a certain amount when a user clicks your advert and proceeds to your website.

The more you pay, the higher you will normally appear in the sponsored listings.

Other than a minimum charge, there is no restriction on the keywords you can choose. If you run a company called Foozle Software, any of your competitors can have their adverts appear when the keyword “Foozle” is entered.

This situation has been brought to light by luxury fashion designer Louis Vuitton. The company claimed Google’s practice of selling trade names was illegal under European law and also allowed counterfeit traders to sell fake goods. In 2006, a Paris court ordered Google to pay $250,000 for trademark counterfeiting, unfair competition and misleading advertising. Google has appealed to The European Court of Justice and could win following an adviser’s recent statement:

Google has not committed a trademark infringement by allowing advertisers to select keywords corresponding to trademarks.

Is trademark hijacking a major problem? A similar issue was raised by the use of competitor names in meta tags. The fact remains that, defamation laws aside, there is nothing to stop anyone creating a website that mentions your brand name. Search engines should remain impartial; they must be permitted to link to that content if it is relevant to the search phrase. However, perhaps AdWords is not impartial because it favors the biggest spenders?

Unfortunately, search engine competition is becoming so important, we could see many big businesses resort to litigation. I suspect many lawyers are secretly hoping Louis Vuitton wins their case.

Has a competitor used your trade or product name? Was it a problem and how did you handle the situation?

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3. AdWords Offers Demographic Site Targeting

Some sites (usually blogs), may stop doing well in search, commonly after minor site adjustments like: adding new widgets, plugins or rich-media files. These additions could break the code, making it impossible for search engines to crawl the site.

Sites that are developed from the start with special features like JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash may never perform well Not because the search engines cannot read such pages, but because some are simply not coded correctly. Optimizing bad coded sites for search is time consuming and costly. If you plan a new site make sure you ask the developers to pay special attention to the code, and make sure that all of the pages appear correctly in different browsers.

The easiest way to avoid any such problems is to develop sites that respect Google’s guidelines for Flash and rich media, and Google’s technical guidelines.

Some special tips for WordPress users:

As I already mentioned, adding widgets and plugins could change page code, or even break it, and the result is almost always lower performance in search engines.

A plugin known to cause problems is What Would Seth Godin Do (WWSGD). This plugin adds a text that encourages new visitors to a blog to sign up as an RSS subscriber. If you set the plugin to add this welcome message before the first paragraph of a blog entry, its text might be the only thing Google indexes as the “description” of the page it appears on. The plugin deactivates the welcome text after a certain number of returning visits, but Google’s crawler will be seen by the plugin every time as a new visitor, so you will end up with a series of articles indexed by Google like this:

Google’s bot is smart enough to read the rest of the text and the site gets indexed, but the search engine ranking will be mediocre at best. If you must have WWSGD on your site, try to add it after the body text of the article.

Sometimes plugins crush the MySQL database (WP Super Cache and Comments Relish have known issues); if your blog remains unavailable for too long (usually a few days) it may be completely de-indexed. Luckily most WP users are able to find resolutions to such problems in due time. For less savvy users, a word of advice: less is more. Don’t add too many widgets, badges, scripts or plugins.

The most dangerous instances, however, are generated by scripts already existent in customizable WP themes; for example scripts that add a tag cloud on every page. Each tag is a link and the more links you have on a page, the lesser its “link juice” value. Some tag clouds display only a limited number of tags to the user, but if you open the “page source” to see the code you can sometimes see a clutter of hundreds of tags. This clutter creates pages that are too big, load extremely slowly and can cause crawl problems.

For news publishers (indexed by Google News), these crawl problems appear as “article too long” or “article fragmented” and “page too large” (pages can only be 256KB long) and lead to total de-indexing. Other publishers are not affected, but their SE rankings remain low (a possible solution is to install a plugin that adds rel=”nofollow” to tags). A known theme that can generate such problems is WP Magazine (click on any article title on the demo site and look at the source code).

I hope these few examples give you an idea of how important good coding is for a site’s SE success. If you know of any other instances when bad nested code hurts website publishers and search engine rankings, please let us know.

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Online Marketing Inside Out by Brandon Eley & Shayne Tilley is a book that will lead you through all the elements of an effective online marketing strategy including SEO and social media optimization. The book deals with some important aspects of PR and new media as well and it teaches you how to develop your own marketing plan to achieve the most from the search engines and other online venues. If you have a website, want to promote it, but you don’t know where to start, this is the book for you. The price $29.95 also includes a free copy of Darren Rowse’s 31 Days To A Better Blog.

Another excellent book is Peter Kent’s Search Engine Optimization For Dummies available at Amazon. The book will teach you how to plan a search engine optimization strategy, how to choose the right keywords, how to use social networking to improve your search rankings, how to track and measure your results and more.

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin is another popular book that explains why SEO is important and teaches how to create appealing marketing websites. In addition the authors try to teach how to design human-usable websites, a very important aspect of site optimization. Many SEO tips in this book are timeless: they will work regardless of algorithmic changes.

When it comes to SEO you should probably take into consideration that optimizing for the search engines is pointless if the site is not appealing for the users. It is important to optimize sites visually as much as you optimize the textual content that helps you rank well in the SERPS. To understand the basics of web design that sells, I would recommend that you purchase SitePoint’s Sexy Web Design by Elliot Jay Stocks that will guide you through the entire process of creating a gorgeous, usable web site by applying the timeless principles of user-centric design.

Talking about page optimization, another great resource is Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions by Tim Ash. The book teaches you how to “know” your visitors and how to develop an action plan that gets buy-in from all key players. Basically, the book answers to a question not many website owners dare to ask: How much money are you losing because of poor landing page design? SEO is pointless for sites with poor design: the rankings will be there, but your site is not going to “sell.”

Related to the user-centric design books in the list, Steven Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability is a must have for any website owner and for anybody who wants to build a website in the future. Usability and SEO should never be separated as a matter of fact.

Another SEO book you want to have is Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond by Aarron Walter. The book covers more than just some SEO tips and tricks – it shows how to build sites that respect the web standards and have more compelling content. The main idea of the book is that you don’t have to compromise the user experience to create search engine friendly, findable websites.

Last but not least, as we all know that the secret to good SEO is good content, I’d like to recommend Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty. This is a The New York Times bestseller, and it was also featured on Oprah, The Wall Street Journal and other prominent publications.

Of course, some newbies would prefer free SEO books to start with. There are of course some very good publications online:

1. The Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
2. The Bing’s SEO Guide for Wembasters
3. The SEO Fast Start Book by Dan Thies
4. A free SEO book from iBusinessPromoter
5. The Free SEO Book by SEO Elite

So, as a starting point for those who are interested, which anyone with a website should be of course, I hope this information is helpful. In trying to answer sometimes complex questions, reaching every reader with the right tone and level of knowledge is often difficult. However, doing some surface or preliminary research into these publications should avail new site owners, and those interested in Search Engine Optimization much. Let me know what you think, as always, and if you know of a good SEO book for beginners I haven’t listed here, please mention it in your comments.

Author’s note: none of the links in this entry are affiliate links.

What is SEO? image courtesy SEOMoz.

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The problem with the SEO “link bait” strategy is that it often uses “tricks” to generate incoming links to a site from other sites, but also to attract traffic. As we know however, tricks are not always the best strategies.

Types of Link Bait

Link baiting is a technique that does just that: it hooks the readers; it attracts them to your content. If they “bite” they might as well link back to whatever it is you want them to link at; and that’s how you know that your “bait” was successful: the content is the bait, the “back- link” is the catch.

There are different strategies to “bait” you can use, from “quality content” to content that has not so much to do with your site’s actual niche (the “empty hook”), from images to video and sound, and from badges and widgets to useful resources and etc – in the end how you attract readers to your site has a lot to do with your creativity and ingenuity.

There are seven main types of link bait: attack hook, humor hook, contrary hook, incentive hook, news hook, ego hook and resource hook. For each of these you can use different strategies and techniques: call out a famous blogger, make someone famous, give something away, give an award, etc. A very popular link baiting technique in the blogosphere for example is the “meme” – if the subject “catches” the initiator gets tons of links (all participants are required to link to the original entry – we will discuss this another time).

How to Bait? The Emotional Marketing Value of a Title

It’s not the content that hooks, it’s the title. You have two seconds to attract the readers’ attention, that’s why writing a “killer headline” is a skill any publisher should master.

The title needs to carry an emotional marketing value that is high enough to persuade the audience. Titles with poor EMV don’t hook; and they are often ignored by the reader. If the title is ignored, the content has little chance of being read.

My headline today has an emotional marketing value of over 33% (tested with the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer from the Advanced Marketing Institute).

According to the Advanced Marketing Institute, the English language contains 20 % EMV (emotional marketing value) words and most professional copywriters will have 30%-40% EMV words in their titles, while the most gifted will have 50%-75%. The ideal is 100% – very rare unless the headline is less than five words.

In comparison, a title like “Link Baiting Tips for Beginners” has an EMV of 0%, while “SEO Link Baiting Advice” scored 25%. Lisa Barone’s “Can Link Baiting Mature? Yes, It Has To” scored 12.5%, Brian Clark’s “The History of Link Bait” scored 40%, and Chris Brogan’s “The Subtle Art of Linkbaiting” scored 20%.

How to Bait? The Emotional Impact of a Title

The Advanced Marketing Institute identifies three emotional impact groups: intellectual, empathetic and spiritual.

Depending on the audience you want to attract, each group appeals to different aspects of an individual.

The headline “SEO Fishing with an Empty Hook” is classified by the Advanced Marketing Institute as “Intellectual.” Intellectual titles are effective to arouse curiosity and attract readers interested in topics that require reasoning and careful evaluation. Obviously my intent was to “hook” the intellectual readers to start a meaningful conversation about link baiting as an SEO technique.

In comparison, Lisa Barone’s “Can Link Baiting Mature? Yes, It Has To” has been categorized as “Spiritual.” Spiritual titles carry the strongest potential for influence and are often making the most powerful presentation in the marketplace (note that “spiritual” is not restricted to religion specifically).

Chris Brogan’s “The Subtle Art of Linkbaiting” has been classified as empathetic. This is not very common in the SEO industry – empathetic titles are mostly used by people involved in the care giving industry. However, the purpose of an empathetic title is to bring out strong positive reactions in people, so if this is what you aim for, write empathetically.

Other aspects of link baiting will be discussed in a future article, but an initial understanding of how link baiting works, and how the title plays such a key role, is sufficient for building a basic strategy. The thing to remember is, great SEO benefits can be derived by publishers if the methods are performed ethically. Like other SEO strategies, link baiting is just part of a much broader strategy for impressing Google and other search engines. While my title was the “hook”, it was definitely not “empty”, as I think anyone can benefit from these helpful tidbits, which have never been covered in a similar link baiting article, anywhere else.

Types of Link Bait graphic courtesy Elliance.

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Today, we’ll highlight the three most important on-page SEO techniques described in this guide – all well-known aspects by experienced SEOs, but important information for those less familiar with what we call “white hat SEO” (SEO techniques that are approved and recommended by the search engines).

Create unique, accurate page titles

The page title is probably the most important on-page SEO aspect – often ignored by many webmasters. Ideally you should have a unique title for each page on your site, as pages with identical titles tend to be treated as “duplicates” by Google (the search engine will only display one of the pages in its results, indexing the duplicates as “supplemental results.”)

The best practices for page title tags are common sense: choose a title that communicates the content of the page and avoid using titles like “untitled” or titles that have nothing to do with the content. Last, but not least: avoid stuffing keywords in your title tags, and avoid ALL CAPS titles.

Another important aspect: if the title is too long (usually more than 60 characters), is that Google will only show a snippet in the search results.

Make use of the “description” meta tag

This is the second most important on-page SEO element (when it comes to what is getting indexed by the search engines). Google might use this as a snipped for your page in the search results – as sometimes Google may choose to use a snippet from your page’s visible text if it matches better the user’s query. Alternatively, if your site is listed in the Open Directory Project, Google might use the description provided there. If you want to prevent Google and other search engines from displaying ODP data, you should add the following meta tag to your pages: <meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP”> (this will only prevent search engines that support meta tags from displaying ODP data).

Meta descriptions should summarize accurately the page’s content, and you should avoid writing descriptions that are unrelated to the content of the page. You should also avoid using descriptions like “this is a webpage”, too short descriptions and keyword-stuffed descriptions. Copying the entire content of the visible text of your page into the description meta tag is a undesired as well: descriptions should usually be less than 160 characters. As with page titles, meta descriptions should be unique for each page of the site too. Using the same meta descriptions “site-wide” or for a large number of pages could force Google to show only one page in the results, sending the rest in the supplemental results index.

Improve the structure of your URLs

Search engine friendly URLs are not a “must” – they are however recommended. Google suggests that these allow for better crawling, and that they appear “friendlier” for those who want to link to your content.

For example, URLs like in the image below can be confusing for the users who would have a hard time memorizing or creating a link to it.

Some users link to pages using the URL as the anchor text (example below) – if the URL contains relevant words, this will help the search engines and other users more than IDs or other oddly named parameters.

So, an ideal URL uses words instead of numbers, session IDs, and etc. Lengthy URLs are not recommended either, and so are generic page names like “page1.html”. Keyword stuffing in the URLs is not allowed.

It is also very important to provide a single version of a URL to reach a document – to prevent users from linking to one URL, and others linking to a different version (thus splitting the reputation of the content between the URLs). Last but not least: do not mix www and non-www versions of URLs in your internal linking structure.

More SEO Techniques from Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

This guide describes all major onsite techniques, including site navigation, content, onsite links and best practices for anchor texts, using heading tags appropriately (do not confuse with HTML tags or HTTP headers), image optimization, making use of robots.txt, how and when to use rel=”nofollow” attributes for links, how to promote your site the right way and so on. The guide is particularly important because it can save a lot of time, trouble and even money for those who are looking for the “right answers” when it comes to onsite SEO: there are no secret formulas, as you will see when reading the guide. In addition to the guide, I recommend that you use Google’s Website Optimizer to check your pages to see what on-page changes will produce the best conversion rates with visitors.

Although the guide doesn’t go in-depth describing how to write catchy page titles, and how to write content that sells, the tips provided by Google are what I like to call “timeless SEO” – rules that will never change. I once compared the job of an SEO to that of a book editor: SEO is editing a site, optimizing it, preparing it for the market.

Every site owner who cares about the content of his/her site, about the navigation and the site structure, about how the images harmonize with the text, and so on, does this type of SEO, although some prefer not to call it that. Regardless of terminology, there can be no better source for information about what a search engine wants from your pages than from the source itself. Using the simple techniques provided in these, combined with easy references like the one you are reading, can only lead to better indexing for your sites. It’s as simple as that! At least for the beginner, it is a great place to start.

On-page SEO cartoon courtesy SEOmoz; all other images courtesy Google (*.pdf SEO guide).

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The New SEO 2.0 Trends

Web 2.0 is a social entity, and obviously SEO for Web 2.0 needs to be social.

Building social networks on Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, YouTube, FriendFeed, Twitter and the like, is only one aspect. If you build them, the followers will not necessarily come. You have to give visitors a reason to become members of your community, and more importantly, you have to give them a reason to click on the links you submit to their attention if you want to fully benefit from the “network effect” so many web marketers are talking about today. Twitter is the perfect example of how this “network effect” can be beneficial. For example, Dell managed to make $3 million in revenue using Twitter to announce special offers and to communicate with their consumers.

Link baiting, another modern SEO technique, has a social aspect too: by publishing content people are really interested in, you basically encourage them to “call out” your site. Good content goes viral in a matter of hours. The readers will “tweet” your link, pass it along (this works pretty much like “word of mouth” ), mention your content on their sites, and etc. This is how natural links are built, and this is the only meaningful way to start a linking campaign nowadays.

Another important SEO aspect is defined as “long tail.” The term was originally coined by Chris Anderson in 2004 to describe the niche strategy of some businesses that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. As you see, the original meaning of the term had nothing to do with SEO. SEOs, however, like the term, and applied it to define an SEO strategy that deals with long keyword phrases (typically containing up to 5 words per phrase), that usually deliver less traffic but higher conversions.

Measuring SEO 2.0

Obsessing with page views and Alexa rankings is obviously not the way to measure SEO success anymore. Your analytics program offers a number of metrics that are more or less relevant, if you know how to read them.

For example, if the best performing keywords are the ones mentioning your brand, then your SEO is not that great. Good SEO delivers traffic for non-brand keywords more than for brand keywords. Of course, it is important to have searchers looking for your brand, but you don’t want to be dependent on it for natural traffic.

Another important metric, if you use Google Webmasters Tools for example, is the number of unique pages crawled and indexed by the search engines. The more unique pages you have indexed in the search engines, the higher your chances to drive traffic and generate sales.

The number of pages driving traffic to your site is also very important: it is in your best interest to keep this number high, to fully benefit from the “long tail” advantage mentioned above. Pages that don’t drive traffic are practically dead pages: they only clutter your site instead of bringing an SEO advantage.

Of course, there are other metrics that help in measuring how successful your SEO 2.0 is. Can you think of any? The comments are open, let’s talk!

Image courtesy SEO Refuge: SEO in the Afterlife

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Bing uses different indexing algorithms and a redesigned SERP, which don’t always deliver the most relevant results, but do perform satisfactory in the fields most targeted by Microsoft: health, local, travel and shopping. These are the fields with the highest potential for revenue for both publishers and search engines (while they offer the search functionality for free for the general users, all search engines monetize through ads and the four industries above are the best paying ones).

It is important to know that Bing gives preferential treatment to these four industries: it becomes clear why some searches return irrelevant results, while others appear more relevant than Google. But this doesn’t mean that Bing changes SEO. In a whitepaper released June 1, 2009, “Bing – New Features Relevant to Webmasters”, the Bing Webmaster Center Team notes:

Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.

SEO for Bing

However, since the algorithm is different and the search results are structured to fit Bing’s new schema, we can actually talk about “SEO for Bing.” Some of the aspects that influence indexing are described in the whitepaper mentioned above:

• Bing makes it easier to compete for broad terms, because it surfaces more categories automatically, increasing the number of results on the page and generating more content – SEO strategies will have to adapt to optimize content for these categories
• Keyword searches are presented with Quick Tabs that present branches of the parent keyword. This surfaces many websites that rank highly for those keyword combinations – content-rich sites will out-convert sites with lesser relevant text
• Multi-threaded SERP design surfaces many more pages that will be associated with the searcher’s primary keywords than would have surfaced in a single-threaded SERP list
• Bing removes duplicate results from categorized results lists, which allows other, lower ranked pages to be shown in the categorized results on its SERP – hence the poor quality of some results.

According to German SEO expert Tad Chef, who responded to a “Will Bing change SEO?” Twitter survey for SitePoint, Bing definitely plays an important role in the search field for US consumers:

Click on the image to enlarge.

Other respondents (like GlobalPatriot for example) take the “wait and see” approach.

Click on the image to enlarge.

“SEO for Bing” – Best Practices

Like any other search engine, Bing derives standard captions from unique titles and meta description tags. Writing relevant page titles and meta descriptions is a must, especially if you want to win visits from the searchers who use Bing’s “Document Preview” to be sure that the content they are seeking is actually available on your site.

Good content and SEO remain a very important aspect in developing a site, and this is also vividly encouraged by the Bing Webmaster Center Team.

Best of all, the type of SEO work and tasks webmasters need to perform to be successful in Bing haven’t changed—all of the skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously applies fully today with Bing. Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in Google and Yahoo! as well.

“Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters” does not mention other SEO practices: there is no mention of an algorithm, no mention of linking strategies that might work, nothing but “on page” SEO. However, we can safely assume that the SEO strategies that made a site rank high in Live’s SERPs still work. One thing is certain: Bing is based on Powerset, which attempted to rank sites based on semantic technologies. This could mean that “meatier” content has more chances than sites that focus more on visuals.

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I intended to write about how Bing influences the SEO spectrum this week, but instead, I will write about another search engine I accidentally stumbled upon during some random research. Why do I choose something not many Internet users know about instead of a popular topic? Because the “little people” do not have $100 million USD to pump in a PR campaign to promote something that, aside from being a noisy name and containing some apparent structure, is nothing but hype.

I will, of course, publish my take on Bing and SEO, but not today. Today I invite you to discover what a modern search engine should really look like.

Visual Is Good

Searchme is a visual search engine, beautifully executed, although they pretty much spoil it by displaying ads by Google on the results page.

Click on the image to enlarge.

The results are usually relevant — for example, searching for mystery novels will give Amazon’s Mystery and Thrillers on the forth position, and some other related and relevant results following, but…

Searching for “sitepoint blogs” comes with an unexpected surprise:

Click on the image to enlarge.

How could this happen? The content on the page listed by Searchme scrapes original content from SitePoint, this is how. But the more important question is: what types of content filters are used by Searchme (note that I set the preferences to filter out adult content) and how is the company going to address this issue?

On one hand, being able to see a screenshot of a page before clicking on a link is positive: we will no longer waste time wondering whether the content we expect is there. The way Searchme displays these screenshots is pretty relevant too. Note in the image below that Searchme generates screenshots that highlight the keywords on the site and that these screenshots are accompanied by relevant snippet of content.

Social Is Good, Too

Another thing I like about Searchme is the “share” feature, which allows sharing the search results via Twitter, Facebook or email. What is very interesting here is that when you click the share button you will not send to your network the bulk search results, but the one that appears in the foreground, with the other results stretching on the right and left, as per the standard Searchme display mode.

Preferences Are Good As Well

Searchme’s preferences allow users to choose whether they want to view adult content or not (although, as I already proved above this feature doesn’t work properly); and offers other choices like the ability to toggle between two different backgrounds for the search engine (night theme and day theme), open links in the same window or a new one, turn media autoplay on or off, and finally chose display mode between Searchme full and Searchme lite.

Stacks Are Great

I simply love this feature: Searchme allows you to save the most relevant results of your choice in a visual gallery. You can create as many stacks as you want, name them and categorize them, and of course, share these with your friends, add them to a blog, and etc:

Searchme.com — the Brand

Not the best brand name; actually, it is so bad that I almost didn’t click on their link when I first saw it. My first reaction was: oh, no, not another Google killer wannabe! I imagined a cheap attempt to create a meta search engine that returns screenshots of the given query, followed by some snippets of text — pretty much like the Searchme Lite version, that doesn’t impress at all, and it doesn’t even represent Searchme’s main strength.

Click on the image to enlarge.

What were they thinking when choosing this name? That people will fall in love with it and suddenly go “searchmeing” instead of “googling”? Is it as obvious for you as it is for me why Searchme is not a good name for a search engine? The call to action, “search me” reminds me of a situation where an innocent person is accused of stealing something and encouraging his/her accuser: “Search me, you’ll see that I don’t have it.”

One main rule of branding is to choose a name that is memorable, and can “differentiate your cow from all of the other cattle on the range. Even if all the cattle on the range look pretty much alike” (Al Ries and Laura Ries; “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding”). Some companies live under the impression that the quality they offer is enough to make a brand stand out, but quality alone is not what makes a brand. I could go on forever explaining why Searchme is a bad brand name, but right now I don’t think it is very important. The important factor is the technology used by this search engine to display search results. The brand name may change: after all, what is Bing if not MSN and Live rebranded?

Conclusion

Whenever a new search engine emerges we expect something fresh and revolutionary. Searchme is far from being perfect now, but it is a startup, and we have to give all startups the chance to learn and to grow. But, in its current form, Searchme almost convinced me to make the switch. Searchme full (and not Searchme lite) is what the search engine of the future should offer: relevant results in a visually appealing form, with sharing functionality, added interface flexibility and the option to save results in collections! Can you think of anything else?

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Apparently it doesn’t matter how many times reputable SEOs like Michael Gray, Aaron Wall, Dany Sullivan and others advise not to obsess about PageRanks – there will always be people who proudly showcase their success in getting a higher PageRank, or get terrified when their sites’ PageRanks drop. Last week I had a commenter who was so convinced that scraper sites helped his site get a higher PR that he almost turned into an advocate of scrapers.

What many webmasters don’t know is that there are in fact two entirely different things that are called “PageRank”. The one everybody is obsessing about is the toolbar PageRank, which really doesn’t matter, because:

• What you see is not what you get. PageRanks are computed continuously so when you see a PageRank 5 that site could in fact have a PageRank 7 or 2 (Matt Cutts).

  PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users.

• Toolbar PageRank updates do not influence SERPs (Matt Cutts)
  

  It’s just a toolbar PageRank update. Even if you don’t show much PageRank, Google still has 200+ other signals we use in our ranking. It’s definitely common to see lower-PageRank sites ranking above higher-PageRank sites–which tends to confuse the people who obsess too much about PageRank, and who don’t focus on other factors that search engines might use to rank pages.

• Google lowers manually PageRanks for sites that are selling links (Danny Sullivan)
  

  So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links. In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.

• It doesn’t determine your Google footprint. Criticizing Steve Rubel’s take on PageRank importance, Vannessa Fox writes:
  

  If there’s one thing that PageRank is not, it’s the determination of your Google footprint. The internal “real” PageRank isn’t even that. Lots of things go into determining your Google footprint. His discussion in the comments goes further down this path of misunderstanding what PageRank is. He agrees with someone in the comments who says that “PageRank is the sum of all other measurements.” It’s not. It’s one measurement added in with a whole bunch of others.

The only thing that does matter is the internal PageRank assigned by Google to a site, but that’s something no one except Google knows.

To make a long story short: there’s nothing magical about having high PageRanks, and definitely not if you obtain these by employing black hat or gray hat techniques (like using scraper sites or other bad neighbours to boost PageRanks). You will never really know what the real PageRank of a site is anyway, not even if you “test it” using such a tool that checks Google PageRanks in 700 data centers.

Sure, you can optimize your site for higher PageRanks, and for more traffic, and for better SERPs, but, as Vanessa Fox said:

If you “optimize the crap” out of your site so that you rank #1 for relevant keywords, but your site isn’t compelling to searchers, that ranking will be completely meaningless as those new visitors will click right back to the search results rather than engage with your site.

Related posts:

1. Changes to PageRank?
2. Google To Abandon PageRank?
3. More Google SEO Myths Exposed

An older article, on the same site, reads Deftly dealing with duplicate content and clarifies most of the issues related to this topic. Although the article is dated 2006, things haven’t changed that much in the “duplicate content” camp. Google still wants you to optimize your sites and block all on-site duplicate content appropriately. Google still wants you to keep your internal linking consistent, they still want you to handle country-specific content with appropriate TLDs and they still want you to use the preferred domain feature in webmaster tools. Boilerplate repetition rules haven’t changed, and Google still doesn’t like publishing stubs (although many sites still get away with such practices, but not for long).

It’s still astonishing that Google advises not to worry about scrapers, since these rank often above the original content in its SERPs (image below – click to enlarge).

As a general rule, scraper sites don’t hurt as much as on-site duplicate content – and did you know that your website template counts in the duplicate content calculation too? Behind what the eye sees there is the HTML code that uses “words” to generate the visible layout. If those words in the code outnumber the actual text of an article by 70 % you might have duplicate content issues. So, if you have this possibility, don’t be too lazy to write longer texts.

Last but not least, you should know that on-site duplicate content can also influence your PageRank. You probably thought that when you publish a new site the PageRank is zero. Wrong. Every time you publish a new page it will have a PageRank greater than zero. Google assigns PageRank to sites just for existing – when they first appear the PageRank is based on internal linking structure and content, and not calculated based on external links. What influences the PageRank in such a situation is the content of the site and the number of non-duplicate pages (the more the merrier). I hope this gives at least one answer to those who saw their new sites having a PR4 for example, and then got puzzled because their PR dropped. PageRanks drops because Google’s generosity doesn’t last long. If new pages get a PR greater than usual, take advantage of the opportunity and try to get as many external links as possible to support them, or else, Google’s next PR update will make you wonder WTF!

Related posts:

1. Mobile SEO Myths Exposed
2. Improve SEO with Google’s New Canonical Element
3. Changes to PageRank?