Canonical Link Element

There is a Google Webmaster Central blog post about the presentation about canonical link elements made at SMX West and talked through in a video:

PageRank is Dead, Long Live Page Rank

Go to Google and enter "find Chuck Norris" then press I'm feeling lucky. It's a Google Bomb.

The number one result for "find Chuck Norris" beats out about 8,750,000 other pages, but only has about 136 sites linking to it. What's notable is that these sites that link to the number one result do not have particularly high PageRank. One linking site has PageRank 5, and there are a bunch of PageRank 1, 2 and 3s; most seem to have no PageRank at all.

This does suggest that many links from high PageRank sites are not needed to be a number one result on a fairly competitive keyword. Google returns results we [Google] believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page (from Google's support page about how they crawl, index, and serve the web).

PageRank is not the be all end all of high search rankings it may have once been. It is still one factor Google uses, even if only 0.5% of the factors used. However, Google has also publicly said that the PageRank publicly displayed by Google's systems is not current (usually 3 months old) and is not the private one their systems use to decide rankings.

Is PageRank dead? Or useless? No. PageRank is convenient. When discussing Google rankings with people who aren't focused on or don't have knowledge of search marketing, PageRank is a deceptively concise number that is often used to express success and value regardless of whether either actually exist. It suggests a page is good if the PageRank is high, and bad if it is low. But PageRank does not tell you how successful a site will be at ranking highly.

More important than ranking, PageRank has no relationship with whether a site will be successful; A page's purpose (selling things, engaging visitors, entertaining with Chuck Norris references, etc.) can be fulfilled with no PageRank at all. Also, a page with high PageRank can fail utterly to accomplish anything constructive for anyone (at least short term).

Success online, as in life, is about success itself, as one defines it (e.g., sales, sign-ups, informed visitors, improving the world, happiness). If your page is hugely successful and has high PageRank, wonderful; if it's hugely successful with low or no PageRank, that's wonderful too. PageRank is only one metric among many, and it's tempting to put more value on PageRank than actually exists.

Many times PageRank has been discussed with clients, or other "stake holders," with regards to a site or page's value, and while this easily graspable shorthand may make us feel good, it also can keep us from addressing real value. At the same time, given the secrecy of Google and other search engines' algorithms, many feel utterly in the dark about search rankings that can vastly effect success, income and job security. PageRank is the promise of seeing inside the black box of how search rankings are decided, a promise often broken.

In the absence of clear objectives and metrics, PageRank can be an appealing substitute, but in reality PageRank is only one of many, many elements that need considering. When PageRank is used as the only gauge of a page's value, success or health it leads to bad conclusions, just as using a child's height as the only gauge of the child's heath, success or value would lead to bad conclusions.

Blogger Feeds as Sitemaps with FeedBurner (and Google Webmaster Tools)

...if you have a site whose original feed redirects traffic to FeedBurner (for example, if you use Blogger redirection, or you use our FeedSmith plugin for WordPress), you will need to give Webmaster Tools the address of a feed that does not get redirected as a sitemap source.

For Blogger users, the following general feed URL format should always work:

http://mybloggerblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?redirect=false

For WordPress FeedSmith plugin users, use this URL format:

http://www.mywpblog.com/?feed=rss2

For other platforms, other feed URL variations that are not redirected are what you need to provide.

(from FeedBurner Forums).

8 Reasons Your Web Site is Underperforming (That You Don't Already Know)

A web site's ranking and user experience are affected by many things you may not know because they're beyond the HTML on the web pages themselves. They can help or hurt your search engine ranking and your user's experience.

1. Domain name not registered for maximum length; Google and others take domains registered for many years more seriously


2. Server response time is slow and/or uptime is low


3. Server and/or name servers are in a "bad neighborhood"


4. Server hosts other sites too
   • looks like you are not as serious and are not stable enough to weather a spike in traffic (e.g., the Slashdot effect)
   • at risk of server going down, and taking your site with it, if another site on the server has an error or spike in traffic (slash-dotted/dugg)
5. no robots.txt file


6. no valid xml sitemaps


7. Dynamic looking URLs; they have a "?" in them


8. Character encoding mismatches
   • encoding declared in the HTTP headers doesn't match the encoding declared in the page's meta tag
   • Encoding on the actual page doesn't match either the encoding declared in the header and/or in the meta tag

There are also lots of things that affect your success that are on the web page; subscribe to learn more about those too.

Domain Registration Length Affects Rankings

How long you register a domain name for impacts it's search engine rankings. Pagerank is essentially the first claim of US Patent 220050071741 (which is held by many people including some Google employees). It states:

A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data.

Claim 38 says (my emphasis added):

The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes domain-related information corresponding to domains associated with documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: analyzing domain-related information corresponding to a domain associated with the document over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on a result of the analyzing.

And claim 40 specifies some of the domain-related information they are referring to (my emphasis added again):

The method of claim 38, wherein the domain-related information is related to at least one of an expiration date of the domain, a domain name server record associated with the domain, and a name server associated with the domain.

Therefore, amongst the over 100 factors used in determining a page's pagerank and its ranking in search engine results is the expiration date of the domain of the page. Reason suggests more legitimate web sites are committed to their domain names and would register them for the more time than fly-by-night sites. Google sums it up best in the patent's 99th claim (my emphasis added once again):

Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

Search Results Vary Based on Country

Google localizes search results based on the country from which you are accessing Google. This is intended to give the most relevant results based on where you are. You can choose which country's results you want to see, but you must use some sort of proxy. The international version (what the United States sees when searching) is accessible from outside of the US using a proxy, or proxy website that is located inside the US.

Dialing-up or otherwise connecting to the internet through an ISP located in a different country should also work. You can compare what different countries see in Google results using a geotargeted search comparison.

IM with visitors - Make a Google Talk Chatback Link

To let visitors chat with you, using Google talk, create a Google Talk chatback badge and place it on your website, blog or profile.

You can customize what the badge looks like, from just a link, all the way to a fully built out iframe. You need a Google Talk account to use this (you probably have one if you use Gmail).

Google Webinar on Tools, Analytics and Optimizer July 8th

Google Webinar July 8, 2008 @ 9 am pt on Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer.

July 10 Update: It's now online and available for replay

Microsoft Office Alternative

In order to create word processing documents and spreadsheets you can buy office for something like $150 (unless one gets the student version which is usually less) and you'll be able to create and receive documents from most other people and read and write them with no compatibility issues (or realistically minimal ones).

There is also the option of using something like Google Docs to do your word processing and spreadsheets. Advantages include:

• it's free
• online and accessible from any computer connected to the internet
• documents can be imported and exported in any format likely needed (like Microsoft Word and Excel)

The disadvantage is that it works a little differently than Office does so it may take a little time to learn if you are used to using Office. There is a tour of Google Docs online.

Find mp3s with Google

There are several ways to to find mp3 files with Google. One way I've found useful to find songs is to put in a song name, and the follwoing string after it, in the google search bar:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3

For example the star spangled banner can be found searching for star spangled banner or national anthem, though the first gives slightly better results.

Google Analytics for Tracking Campaigns

If you'd like to track what marketing campaigns are leading to what kind of visitors, Google Analytics can do this well. After you install Google Analytics code on your site, using Google's URL Builder Tool to tag links you put in web and email campaigns (i.e., not the links within your site), will allow you to track a visitor from the source of the visit.

Basically, by tagging links that you put in CPC or email campaigns, Analytics will not only tell you which campaign a visitor came from, but it can also follow what they do once they're on your site (by setting up goals in Analytics).

This way you can know not only what campaigns are getting you visitors, but what campaigns lead visitors to do what you want them to do on your site (e.g., buy something from you).

You can even track file downloads, track outbound links and track what visitors subscribe to your feed.