Search Engine Placement

Yes, folks….it’s that time again. Google has updated the visible PageRank (PR) over the weekend and just in time for Halloween!

What’s does PR have to do with Halloween? Absolutely nothing. What does PR have to do with your search engine placement? Well, a fair amount.

Google PageRank measures a website’s link popularity (the number and quality of backlinks it has) on a scale of 0 to 10. A strong link popularity generally equates to trust from Google (and other search engines) and therefore increased search engine placement as well. There are still some people that interpret PageRank as “the holy grail” of search engine optimization but it seems to have been devalued over the years. Don’t get me wrong…there is still a strong connection between link popularity and search engine placement, but there is a bit of a disconnect between the visible PageRank and search engine rankings.

Many website owners have tried to capitalize on PageRank by buying and selling links based strictly on the PR of the referring website. This is against Google’s Webmaster Guidlines and could potentially get both websites penalized if paid links are detected.

Googles breaking into in game video marketing through the recent purchase of Adscape. As an avid marketer and gamer myself, i’m more confused then a tween on his first date. Should I be happy that there may be a new avenue to reach gamers or upset that I might start seeing ads for work at home scams while im roaming the deserts of tatooine in my land speeder.

Does this mean video games we’ll be cheaper to buy as production companies make extra income from marketing contracts? Only time will tell. But, don’t get mad at me if you start seeing advertisments for search engine placement services the next time you’re playing sim city.

Wow is it possible Google might actually lose some money? Viacom has sued Google for one billion dollars for “massive copyright infringement” for YouTube’s video clips, claiming they posted over 160k unauthorized video clips from their cable network.

One billion isn’t much to Google, they paid one billion for YouTube, why not cough up a little more cash? Of course their argument is that they are not to blame. Afterall its the users who are posting the video clips.

What does this mean for those of us in the search engine marketing business? Well nothing, unless they lose. Then we will have one less resource for viral marketing.

Google has added the ability to check your sites back links in Google Webmaster Tools . And SEO’s everywhere rejoiced. It has been ages since Google has allowed access to site back links, mostly because of pesky SEO’s using it to our advantage. With this tool, you can only see links to your own site. You actually have to authenticate that the site is yours. Fore more info, check out the Google Blog.

It looks like it’s that time again…when newbie websites earn their wings by receiving that coveted bit of notoriety from Google. I’ve yet to see any official postings from Google or even from fellow bloggers, but I have noticed that quite a few of my websites and client websites have received their initial PageRank update from Google. The update appears to be affecting only new websites sites that have not yet received a PageRank status from Google. We’ll post more on this in the days to follow as news regarding the specifics begins to surface.

If you don’t already know, duplicate content is bad. Don’t think you have duplicate content? Think again… Say some guy getting into your industry finds your site and decides he likes your content. He copies it onto his website and you’re the one that suffers a loss in your search engine placement.

And so thankfully Google is parlaying with us about what to do, here. Basically, they are saying people use duplicate content to try to garner more traffic, and Google is putting a stop to that.

Here’s how to prevent duplicate content on your site.

• If you have duplicate content on your site you can tell the search engines which pages not to index with a robots.txt file.
• If you have another copy of your site somewhere, use a 301 redirect to re direct users and search engines to the right site. (Ask me if you need help)
• Make sure you use the same link names to link to another page on your site. For example don’t link to indext.html, index.php, index.html/.
• Is your site available in more then one language? Use a top level domain to handle the language pages. For example for French you could get a site.fr or the UK would be site.uk
• You can use Google webmaster tools to pick a preferred domain. For example you could pick a www version or non www version of your URLs.
• Make sure other sites that have your content on their sites link back to you.
• If you use a content management system make sure that it does not publish the same content in multiple formats.

Following the above steps should help make sure your search engine placement does not suffer from issues with duplicate content, and if you do find a site that has duplicate content of yours you can always file a DMCO request.