I never really thought about it, but it seems that you can fake PageRanks.  Now why would you want to do that?  I can think of many different reasons but here is one of the most pressing ones.

I am sure that you have heard of people buying up domains and the reselling them for greater value later on down the road.  These people are speculators, always on the look out for potential money makers.  It is actually brilliant but not always a good thing for those who would need the domains later on.

Anyhow, one of the most important factors that domain buyers take into consideration is the current PageRank of the domain.  If you have ever tried buying an existing domain, you would understand that one of the main reasons you would want to do so is that the PR is already decent.  It would save you months of work and money as opposed to starting from scratch.

It makes perfect sense – unless the PR is fake.  Yup, there are ways and means by which people can make the PR look good when in reality, there is no PR.  Since that is not a matter of importance to us – creating fake PR – let’s not dwell on it.  Instead, let us see how we can determine if the PR is legit.

I do not have much experience in this matter but I ran across a Fake PageRank checker tool.  The URL is http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html.  You can try it out yourself.

Do you know of any other way to determine the legitimacy of PR?

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It is time to get rid of all those heavy graphics, flash, and unnecessary videos. It’s not like the advice about speed hasn’t been given before but previously the main reason was for better user experience (Who likes waiting for a page to load anyway?). This time though (for those who didn’t listen before…) there is another reason why you should make sure that your web pages load really fast – it is one of the factors Google looks at when ranking pages.

Google has confirmed that they use speed in web search ranking, however, they also emphasize that it is NOT one of the major factors in SEO. According to Matt Cutts it is the good old SEO factors like “relevance, topicality, reputation, [and] value-add” that carries the most weight. In fact, Google claims that right now less than 1% of queries are affected by site speed. Despite this fact it is still a good idea to of course optimize your site’s speed, after all with SEO we all know that every bit counts. In the end, it definitely won’t hurt because it’ll do your SEO good and will surely make your visitors happier with the experience.

As for those that have fast-loading sites already then the bright side is that you have one less thing do, which means you can focus on your reputation and link building and of course come up with even better content.

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Attention everybody: it’s time to take out your thesaurus.

We’ve known for sometime how Google uses synonyms to determine the context of the search terms entered by search users. Recently Google Software Engineer Steven Baker brought back the importance of synonyms to focus in his post “Helping Computers Understand Language”. There he discussed how Google recently analyzed just how well their synonyms system works.

According to Steven Baker 70% of search queries made in Google are actually affected by their synonyms system. However, most of the time we don’t even realize it because everything happens in the background. We tend to take the relevance of the results we get for granted, not realizing that a lot of analysis takes place to narrow down the index and spew out those results.

Furthermore Steven baker also said that they found out that out of every 50 queries made that are affected by Google’s synonyms system, only 1 returns a truly bad synonym. That makes for pretty good search results, don’t you think?

However, how should this information affect your SEO approach? Simple. As I said earlier its time to take out your thesaurus and start using more synonyms. Don’t get stuck with technical terms and use laymen’s terms in the same page. This will not only help Google contextualize your pages’ contents but also provide more keywords and key phrases, hence, increasing your pages’ searchability. So don’t get stuck using the same term over and over, expand your vocabulary and do better in SERPs at the same time.

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A question that has been hovering in my mind, and probably many others, since Google’s Realtime Search was launched is just how realtime it is. Obviously Google’s real-time folks are even more interested in the answer than I am and, according to Matt Cutts, here is what they found out after the Haiti earthquake:

Realtime search triggered in under two minutes from the earthquake happening and within a minute of the first tweets appearing.

Not bad. Apparently though for some people it took as much as six minutes for the realtime search to reflect the news. Gasp! That’s so long! Seriously though, I still find myself sometimes amazed at how far search technology (and technology in general) has gone. Before we had to wait hours to get live news from TV crews or via the radio but now all that one has to do is wait for tweets or do real-time search.

Google was pretty happy to give themselves a pat at the back, though of course Twitter is still the ultimate when it comes to real-time news. My point though is not to praise Google and Twitter but to emphasize the importance of posting things ASAP.

With the arrival of real-time search, freshness of results have become even more important, and REGULAR FRESH results even more so. If you want to have more opportunity to be searchable then post on current newsmakers and post them as soon as they happen.

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Early this month Google announced a new user agent for the robots.txt file to direct the Google News bot on what to do. The new user agent, Googlebot-News, is used just the same way you use the Googlebot agent. To make things clear though here are some of the examples given by Google on the use of the new user agent.

Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:

Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /latest_news

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /archives

According to Google “The pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.” Note that you can do this for any specific page.

Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

In this case since Googlebot is disallowed and there is no specific instruction on what to do with Google News, the news bot will play it safe and simply not crawl the page.

Happy New Year!

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Got any questions on SEO? Who better to answer them than Matt Cutts?

If you have questions that need answering head on to the Google Moderator Video Questions Page that Matt Cutts created early this month and submit it there.

Note though that Moderator screens questions and won’t accept your question if it is already too similar to another question submitted. If this happens just vote for the question similar to yours and cross your fingers that others will find the question relevant as well making it popular enough for Matt Cutts to take notice. Matt Cutts will also answer questions he finds interesting; whether popular or not and SEO-related or not.

Matt Cutts will be answering questions via video. It would make sense if he lumps together similar questions in one video, though for sure he’ll need to record multiple videos. Don’t know either if he’ll be mentioning the “questioner” but am sure everyone pretty much wants to be name-dropped by Matt Cutts in his video.

So far top ranking questions are:

“Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?” ~ Mani, Delhi

“Are stats from Analytics (bounce rate, time on site) a factor in a page’s or domain’s ranking?” ~ A, San Francisco

“Organic Link Building, according to me is one of the most difficult tasks for SEO’s of SME’s. Can you please list 5 effective ways of organic link building other than building great content?” ~ Pulkit Agrawal, Ahmedabad, India

So far no non-SEO related on the top voted questions. Do submit them though because Matt Cutts seems to genuinely like getting a break from talking about purely SEO stuff.

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Google has confirmed that the PageRank distribution feature has been removed from the Webmasters Tool. According to Susan Moskwa of Google they removed the feature because they realized that offering such a feature and giving webmaster all over the world advice not to sweat over the pagerank is contradictory. In her answer to a question in Websmaster Central she said, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

The funny thing is that here at even here at Smartpagerank we know that using pagerank as a metric to assess your website or blog’s actual SERPs ranking in Google is no longer smart. What to do? Just look at your actual ranking in search engine results pages and try to work your way to the first page and then to the top results.

Here’s sound advice on what to do from Steve of StraightUpSearch.

So then what should PageRank be used for?
Well, why don’t we start with what it should NOT be used for. PageRank should not be an indicator of SEO success. In fact, if I were a site owner that was paying an outside vendor to improve my organic visibility, I would care less about PageRank. Instead, I’d be focused on whether or not my underlying objectives were being hit, either relative to traffic (branding), site conversions, sales, ROI, etc., and that they were being achieved through best practices.

Remember STOP obsessing about pagerank and focus on metrics that really reflect whether you are on the way to achieving your goals.

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Image Search is becoming more and more important with search engines realizing that users are using image searches with greater frequency. Maybe one of the reasons for this is the fact that users can process search results with images 30% faster than results with plain text (at least Microsoft says so).

With this in it is very important that you also think of how well your images rank. According to WebProNews some of the things you can do to rank in Google’s image search include:

*Adding images to your Google Local Business profile;
*Enabling Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account;
*Adding images to local business citation source; and.
*Adding images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

On the other hand if your focus is ranking in Bing’s image search they say that you should:

*Name image files appropriately – For improved relevance, make sure that the file name describes the image appropriately.
*Alternative image text (alt text) matters – For increased optimization, make sure photos are properly described with alternative text tags, and ensure that test within any images is also
*Watch frame breaking – Sites that attempt to break frames make it more difficult for the image to display correctly within search.  Make sure you’re testing your site against the search engines.

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When it comes to choosing your site URL you’d better make the right choice because it definitely has a significant effect not only one your website SEO but also on user-friendliness.

To make things clear right off the bat let me state that you should use STATIC URLS.

Static URLs have clear advantages over dynamic URLs but before I point out the differences let me make it clear that Google can crawl both URLs even though they also do recommend the use of static URLs.

So why are static URLs preferable over dynamic URLs? Because according to a post in SEOmoz static URLS have the following advantages:

• Higher click-through rates in the SERPs, emails, web pages, etc.
• Higher keyword prominence and relevancy
• Easier to copy, paste and share on or offline
• Easy to remember and thus, usable in branding and offline media
• Creates an accurate expectation from users of what they’re about to see on the page
• Can be made to contain good anchor text to help the page rank higher when linked-to directly in URL format
• All 4 of the major search engines (and plenty of minor engines) generally handle static URLs more easily than dynamic ones, particularly if there are multiple parameters

Note though that according to Google if you already use a dynamic URL it is best to leave it alone since re-writing it just to make it look like a static URL can lead to more problems. As their search quality team said, “If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static…However, if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good.”

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One of the most indispensable tools for any webmaster who wants to rank in Google is obviously Google’s Webmaster Tools, after all no one knows better what tools you need to keep track of your site’s statistics. Besides Webmaster Tools allows us to tweak settings so as to ensure that Google takes note of our indexing preferences. Webmaster Tools also allows us to do so many other things. Anyway Google has recently redesigned and released a new user interface for the Webmaster Tools.

For me the best feature of the new UI is the new one-stop shop dashboard. It makes it much easier to view relevant data. If you haven’t switched to the new UI you can check out the new functionalities without logging into your account by simply watching the YouTube video embedded below. You’d better start getting used to the new UI though because the final switch to the new look is coming pretty soon. No need to worry about the learning curve though because the new UI is really much more easy to use than the old one.

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