Matt Cutts has a post on his blog about an update on their web­mas­ter tools that will be very help­ful for folks who work web sites and for folks work­ing their own site.

Before I send you off to his blog to read about this I have to tell you that this infor­ma­tion helped me to find some issues with my site that I did not real­ize were issues. So, if you do not deal with this directly have your web mas­ter check it out for you — it is worth it.

Here’s Matt

A brief from his blog:

“I can’t believe a new fea­ture from Google isn’t get­ting more notice, because it con­verts already-existing links to your site into much higher qual­ity links, for free.

When some­one comes to your site’s web­server and asks for a page that doesn’t exist , most web servers are con­fig­ured to return an HTTP sta­tus code of 404, which means that the page was “Not Found.” If some­one links to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, most web­servers give a pretty sucky expe­ri­ence: vis­i­tors usu­ally land on a pretty use­less page, and search engines might not give you full credit for those 404 errors. ”

Read more here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/free-direct-text-links/

I just touched on this briefly today so will get back to you.

Jan

“Alexa cap­tures some activ­ity, of some users, some of the time. Its results are there­fore inher­ently flawed.”

There is no doubt that folks see Alexa as a rank­ing sys­tem. I did, cer­tainly not now.

Proper stats are a much bet­ter mea­sure­ment of what is going on. The only prob­lem with ‘stats’ is that we are the only ones that see them so the ‘vis­i­tor rank­ing’ only shows to us and not our vis­i­tors. So Alexa may not be cor­rect but I am sure many think what they show to be fact.

Read more on this topic at my fav forum:

http://www.webproworld.com/search-engine-optimization-forum/68568-omg-what-happened-my-alexa-ranking.html

Over the hol­i­days I was read­ing an arti­cle from WebProNews on the Sup­ple­men­tal Index. If you are unfa­mil­iar with the term, let me explain.

Back in 2003 Google intro­duced the Sup­ple­men­tal Index. This was an index (data­base) where web sites, pages went when not up to stan­dards (less impor­tant or less trusted) for Google’s main index (data­base). Now this expla­na­tion is a ‘brief’ to say the least, but you get the idea.

Many busi­ness own­ers were quite upset, and right­fully so, by this because if some­one typed in a search term / phrase and your site / pages were in the Sup­ple­men­tal Index your site would not come up IF oth­ers did show for the search in the main index. They would only show IF they search did not turn up results in the main index.

It’s been reported by Google Search Qual­ity Team that now when some­one types in a search term / phrase both the main and sup­ple­men­tal index will be searched. This is indeed good news.

Read more about this here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/ultimate-fate-of-supplemental-results.html

Happy New Year!

Jan

Unfor­tu­nately not for the good

I noticed yes­ter­day that my page rank had dropped. The drop was not dras­tic, but since it took a lot of hard work to get it from a 5 to a 6 it was very depress­ing to see it back at a 5.

First thing I did was check out my fav forum Web Pro World. Seems I am not the only one that is see­ing the change, though not are all bad.

Now some are of the opin­ion that Page Rank really doesn’t mat­ter as long as you are still get­ting the traf­fic. In some respects I agree with that, but if noth­ing else I see page rank as a pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive Google ‘handshake’.

It appears the scoop is the drop is from ‘inter-linking’ and/or ‘sell­ing links’. Well I do have links to sites I have cre­ated. I think that is just part of busi­ness, these are web­sites my com­pany has cre­ated — the port­fo­lio. I cer­tainly don’t have paid links. Some are also say­ing it is the Big Play­ers that have been “spanked”. Well I would not put my com­pany in the Big Player cat­e­gory, at least the def­i­n­i­tion it seems they are using.

So why the drop?

Since paid links is not an issue my next step is check­ing out what is going on in my stats pro­grams. Google Ana­lyt­ics and Crafty Syn­tax — Live Help, which I can use to com­mu­ni­cate with folks who visit my site and more.

If you want to read an arti­cle about what is being called “Pager­ank Smack­down” Click here.
Cer­tainly one con­cern I have is that the ‘hack’ I had awhile back is now com­ing back to haunt me. (You can read more about that here Surely Google would check this con­sid­er­ing I even posted a remark to Matt Cutts (not that I heard any­thing back) and they are say­ing sites were viewed by humans and not just a script. This is a scary thought.

One thing to keep in mind when read­ing this is that Page Rank and search rank and two dif­fer­ent things. I checked a cou­ple of key­word phrase search terms for my site and I am still doing ok.

Jan

There was a post on a forum I belong to that was ask­ing if what they wanted to do was “kinda Black Hat”. The ques­tion struck me because I am a firm believer that if you have to ask this type of ques­tion chances are it is get­ting into an area that you may not want to go. It also made me think that it was a good time to review all the “hats” for folks that are work­ing on SEO or have some­one doing SEO for them.

Read the arti­cle here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#White

I also offer a SEO ecourse for those that are just start­ing out and need to know that basics. You can read about it here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/SEO-ECourse.html

Just make sure your “hat” is always clean

Jan