Page Rank for Webmaster

HTML elements and text

2011-11-11T03:47:00.001-08:00

While the pagerank influents search results much lesser than few years ago, after the past post I focused my work on other important aspects for placement in search engines. The last update was done by Google at the end of Jun this year, and in that time I was in vacation, two wonderful weeks in South Africa, that I paid with the money I earned with my work on Internet. Back home, I found an electronic letter of a friend who warned me of what happened, namely that Googhi has updated toolbar pagerank. A quick browsing of my sites has given me great pleasure; the new pagerank were substantially better than previous ones. I got so far as to have 5 sites with PR5. But since the final aim is not the pagerank, I went to check my positions in search results. What a disappointment: most sites have lost many positions, in some cases going from the first to the fourth page of SERP.

Several days later I noticed that almost all the pageranks are went back to the old values. I had to say bye, bye to all of my five PR5. What the hell is going on? Perhaps those in the forum have had some light, they understand something that I can’t see. But nothing even there, only other confusion. In fact, even in the forums I found a gloomy atmosphere, cold and despair, because no one understands what happened, or do not want to reveal useful information. Hundreds of hypothesis on how to proceed, what to do, but no certainty, no confirmation on existing facts, that one approach is better than the other. At the end I was only with myself, and I have been busy comparing the first places for different keywords, trying to find out the elements, the methods to be introduced to strengthen my web. Without going to explain how and why, here are two sagacity that I am currently applying, hoping to see a positive outcome.

I remembered a conversation of some time ago with an acquaintance who insisted on the importance of the various HTML elements on the page. In fact, looking at some well-placed pages, I seem to have had some confirmation of this. So I try to introduce new html tags in my pages, such as UL, EMBED, CITE, and so on, trying to get richer the pages’ encoding. This means even more complicated for me. I personally do not like this because I believe that beauty is in simplicity, but I must try to adapt to the situation if I want to do some other nice trip, or long vacation.

Due to the content of the page, with the usual precaution to have the presence of certain keywords, I try to repeat as little as possible other words, using very much synonyms, thus having a greater linguistic diversity. I remember at school that the teacher of English always recommended to avoid repeating the same words. I made a small program in Visual Basic that does a count of words within the text and I noticed that in some cases I repeated the words that had nothing to do with my main keywords. The worst thing is that those words had the density very near to the density of my keywords. Therefore, as in finance, the diversification of coding elements, the words in the text and content of the site are very important.

I forgot! You know that the today’s date should be very lucky: there are 6 number 1 there. At least Chinese think so. Good luck to all of you.

Googleations

2011-05-19T14:32:00.000-07:00

I'm crazy for new inventions in the language field and I was very happy when I got the idea for the title. But someone else has already had this illumination? Easy to check with the gentleman named in the heading. The fact is that have been so many before me to have this inspiring, but anyway I'll keep it because I swear it is the original product of my brain. These days we are more or less one year from the great renewal that Google has made in its algorithm and we can sum up the result. There are two main aspects to consider, our point of view, webmasters who are trying to place our masterpieces on the first page and the experience of other navigators who are simply seeking to obtain information necessary for their work, or even better, for fun. Webmasters have digested the changes and have adopted the new rules. For some it went well, but many still have not been able to reach levels of success they had yesterday and unfortunately the gay that writes this columns is among them.

But for the surfer has gone even worse. An American magazine specializing in the topic of Internet searches has published a survey carried out among the common people and network users, those who do it professionally and the conclusion was catastrophic. Google is no longer the best search engine and the quality of search results provided are worse than during precaffeine, as they called the new version introduced last year. To verify this news I personally started to do some searches and I was remain really disappointed with what Google showed as the best sites. Looking for "online forex" on one national Google, from the first 10 sites listed, 4 did not give any useful information. Indeed, in the first place was a post from one forum containing only one sentence, that is without substance, and with a pagerank 0. Very surprising. Google's management have noticed what was happening and being afraid of losing customers, let’s remember that there are a lot of money from advertising, announced that they are reviewing the algorithm deeply and as quickly as possible they will try to improve it and give to the end users a good product.

For those of us who work around the world this changes promises a new, hard work, first of all to understand the modifications that will be introduced and then apply the appropriate steps to achieve the goal of being present on the first page. There will be so many sleepless nights, a lot of caffeine to keep us awake and new frustrations by seeing our sites slip 10, 20 pages back. But this is the Internet and you have to adapt. One of the ways to go out successfully, without excessive suffer this continuous changes is to make various sites in a different way, by applying a policy of diversification of contents and backlinks, so you can have different profiles and hope that one of them is already well optimized for changes to come.

SEO parameters - second part

2010-11-17T11:07:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's been a while since I wrote my last post but during the summer I prefer to spend time in nature, walking and riding the bike, instead of hanging on the computer. Summer is already gone and it’s time to return to work. The first article was posted in April and those month something important have happened for all the webmasters. Google has introduced Cocaine. Yes, you read right, the new version isn’t called Caffeine, as they want us to believe and I have the evidence to prove all this. The ranking the new version gives, compared to previous ones, can only be produced by an entity heavily doped: you don’t understand how it works. Or at least it was so early, a shock for those involved in this sector, but now the webmaster begin slowly, slowly to understand the new rules and adapt to them. The changes are a lot and in many cases it will take a lot of time and effort to get back on earlier positions, but this is Internet, characterised by its dynamism, many changes, today you are in and tomorrow you are out. But let’s go back to our theme.

Often the second part of a movie or a book has the same title as the first but with the addition of the word "revenge." Therefore, the title could be SEO parameters, the revenge of SE. In fact, in the years to come algorithms became more and more complicated that only few were able to understand. But the turning point was the introduction of backlinks as a parameter. Replicate a site is easy, but having the same external links is much more difficult, especially if the guy we want to reproduce has its own network of sites where he links; certainly he will not give a link to his rival.

With the birth of backlink also the market for links was born. I will pay you and you will post a link to my site on your web page. The result of this was that the strong, I think of those with a solid financial base, have become even stronger and the weaker ones, but often full of enthusiasm and great content, they are almost gone from the front pages with the results. Also Google has noticed this fact and has introduced new rules but without any significant change; it is difficult to be sure that a link has been sold, that is bought. So the internet reflects today's society very well, pure capitalism – money earn money. No despair, there are many exceptions to this rule.

One of the results of back links is also the pagerank, which is widely analyzed in these pages, which lately has become less important than once, but differently of many webmasters who believe in its death (the argument in their favor is the fact that it was not updated for more than half a year), I think it's still an important parameter.

Returning to the words used to link our site, Cocaine has introduced an innovation. The sites optimized for search engines were penalized. Too much uniformity in the keyword of the ancor tag linked to us is for example considered optimizations we mentioned above. Therefore, according to the latest knowledge in the sector, it’s important to diversify the keyword. For example, if our main keyword is "ads online," it should be dilute its presence of about 70% of cases and the remaining 30% use alternative words such as "best ads online," "buy and sell ads" etc.

There are obviously also other terms of comparison, they say more than a hundred, that Google considers, from which many lesser known, but we will see them in the sequel.

SEO parameters - first part

2010-04-15T07:45:00.001-07:00

In this and some future articles I will talk about the parameters that affect the page rankings, especially in Google. Knowing these parameters and the ability to measure them in some way gives us great advantage because it allows us to optimize the SEO work in order to get good results. For newbies, the abbreviation SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Google it, and you’ll get over twenty seven million hits – this tells you how important SEO is. But before going any further, let me talk a bit about how I started in this business and how it was done back at the stone age of internet, more then 10 years ago.

In the late 90’s, when I started to access the Internet using an ancient 48Kb/sec modem, I had already understood how important a good placement in search engines really is, to attract quality web traffic, and visitors clicking the banners and ordering goods or services offered by sponsors. Back then, together with AltaVista, the most popular search engine was Infoseek. I spent hours analyzing the sites that appeared on the first page of results, trying to discover the mechanisms that regulate which site stands at the top of the rankings and which at the bottom. In those days the SEs were not taking in consideration the backlinks and thus it was pretty easy to discover the ranking concept – all I had to do was to analyze the content of the pages. My effort was rewarded and after two weeks of hard work, I succeeded in finding the mathematical formula that assigned scores to a web page. The formula was based on the presence of keywords in the title, text and links. It was enough for me to analyze the source code of the first placed site and I could produce the page that had better score then the analyzed page. The result was that my site became placed at the top of the search list.

The first sites that I developed and the first pennies I earned came from the sponsorship of the adult industry. Being rated first in the rankings for the word "porn" translated into a few thousand dollars a month and I often succeeded to be the first. I already thought about quitting my job and becoming a full time webmaster. After all, my regular job was paying only a fraction of what I was making on the Internet, and besides, I was my own boss and was working whenever I wanted.

However, I soon realized that there are others who had the same idea and the competition was getting fierce. I needed to work day and night in order to beat the competitors and keep the rankings. I remember days when ten or more different sites would occupy the first spot – everything was changing so fast. Soon thereafter, the people at Infoseek have begun to change the search algorithms very frequently, making everything even more complicated. For instance, they introduced limits on the density of the keyword - if a keyword, let’s say, exceeded 6% of all the words on the page, the site was penalized. I had developed a word generator that repeated the keywords as many times as required, but soon realized that this is not going to work any more.
And in order to get a high ranking, the good content was becoming a necessity, the texts became longer, and the files grew larger. The game was getting really complicated.

PageRank Sculpting

2009-11-02T05:43:00.000-08:00

Pagerank Sculpting, what is this? How one can sculpt an unmaterial thing like pagerank? In fact we don’t sculpt PageRank, but it’s distribution within a site. All of us who have one or more sites must admit that some pages are more important than others and we would like that some of them also occur between the results of research, not just our home page. I don’t know who had this idea of modeling the site, but the concept is this: there are important pages within the site that I care about and the others I care less because they have no relevance to the search engines. The idea is to pass more PageRank from those non important to the important pages: it is a redistribution of PageRank. And how we can do it?

The technical procedure is very simple and is accessible to all webmasters. The tip is the using of the tag "nofollow" (again this famous tag). The pages that you want to ignore must be linked from other pages using that tag. In this way the internal links do not pass pagerank to those less important pages, and the available Page Rank is distributed to the most important. Easy to apply and seems also to be very useful in some cases. But is this concept works, is it correct? By my opinion no and I will go to explain my point of view.

Who is familiar with the formula for the calculation of pagerank knows that the pagerank passing to other linked pages drop by a factor of damping (this is not of our interest for this reflection) and depends on the quantity of the number of links. The originators of this technique are confused and thought: putting nofollow tag fore some links, these will not be taken into account for the distribution of pagerank and here is the error. Number of links are used as the probability that one of the links on the page is clicked by a visitor. But the visitor does not see if a link has been tagged and not change anything in its intentions.

My conclusion is that this technique not only does not help the site, but it hurts: the pages linked with nofollow lose pagerank and don’t pass anything to important pages and at the end of the story, all the site is penalized because with less pages, drains less page rank from external links that point it. To those who are not convinced by my argumentation and that in any case would like to try this technique, I can say that this is recognized as legitimate procedure directly from Goolge. If your findings are different from mine, let me to know about.

How to get good placement with Search Engines

2009-07-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

First of all, let’s say what I consider a good placement in Search Engines. It’s simply, the best thing is to be at first place on the first page of search results, but as good position normally is considered to be at the first page. If your site is present at the second or third page, you will probably have some traffic, but insufficiently to make enough money from your little business, supposing that you use the sponsors that pay you for clicks, or more usually for sell products. Let’s remember that the best clients are the visitors that come from search engines. And we want to have lot of them, so they can click our banners and buy our products.

As you can see from various articles on this blog, the tip to reach a good placement in Google and in other search engines is very simply: have a good pagerank and lot of backlinks to our site. The both of this things are reached in the same mode, submitting the site to directories, top lists and exchanging links with other webmasters that have the same scope as you. The concept is basically very natural and simply but it’s not always easy traduce it in the practice. Some of the directories and top lists, too, are specialized in some particular themes and don’t accept sites with not adequate contents. Lot of webmasters don’t want to trade link with some kind of sites, for example with adult sites, or with those that promote online games, or high yield investments.

The solution of this problem is to create a little network, better if a big one, of own sites, dedicated to the most various themes, and very different contents. From my point of view it’s better not go too far, i.e. the themes should be ours, the things that interest and excite us, that we know something about because in that mode is much more easier dedicate free time to this sites. When we create a net of about ten, twenty sites, it becomes rather hard to maintain and promote them if we haven’t passion. Part of our net can be composed of different blogs that we can freely open with some providers and less important sites can be free hosted (however, be careful to chose a good free hosting; there are on the Internet). The most important thing is differentiate arguments and subjects.

So now we can submit this, let’s call them, secondary sites to the places that our main sites wouldn’t be ever accepted and listed because out of topic. When our secondary sites one day finally reach Google’s pagerank (I forgot to say that this secondary sites must be promoted, but it seemed to me superfluous), we will put the links that point our primary sites and the game is done. Practically we obtained indirect links from the sites that wouldn’t give us direct link.

Construction of one little network with at least 10 sites, but not more then 50 if the network is managed by one person only, is an excellent solution that can greatly increase our revenues, but requires from 2 to 3 years of work. Having such a nice network, tomorrow when we will open a new site, we can give it immediately whole of links that will guarantee a fat achieve of page rank. The better thing is that the network is our, so we can do with what we want, and we can link what we need, without any dependence from other subject of Internet life.

Google’s rules

2009-03-16T07:46:00.000-07:00

It seems that recently Google has become more severe in appraising the sites that it visits and that applies more penalization in comparison to the past. For those webmasters that earn money working on Internet, be in a condition in which the site is penalized and it doesn't appear in the search results, corresponds to a catastrophe.

Because the basic rule to earn money with a Internet site is very simple and consists in the being on the first page for the search. No visitors from the search engines, and we know everybody that Google is used from more than the 90% of the navigators, means no money for webmasters. It’s happened to me, too, to be victim of this last wave of the penalizations, and with this article I want to revise the rules of Google together with you; this has been useful for me and I hope for you, too.

The basic condition during the process of the preparation of a site and during its promotion is to examine and respect the rules given by Google, that can be found on the following page:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769.
Let’s see together the basic concepts. They are separated in three groups, and in this way I have prepared my exposure, adding something from my own experience.

Design and content

Shortly, it is advise to use the site structure with static link and that all the pages that want to be considered by, are linked from at least one other page: in this way the search engines can easily find all the resources of the site. The body text must contain the keywords, those tied to the topic of the site. Obligatorily use Title and Alt tag, and if Description tag is used, it should be at least 20 words long. There are also the councils how to organize dynamic pages, but my advise is to avoid them, when this is reasonable. Moreover, control that all the link are working and this is worth also for the connected images. The number of the link on a page would not have to exceed 100, considering the sum of internal and external links. At the end it is advised to write the important texts as text, not to insert them in the images; Google isn’t able to read the text inserted on the images.

Technical aspects of site

During the creation of the site and before putting it online, it is advised to control its “readability” using different browsers, as for example Microsoft Internet Explorer, FireFox, etc, in order to assure the compatibility and correct accessibility with all of them. It is important for the visitors, but also for the robots of the search engines, because they can interpret the same html code in a different way. I always try to produce the most simple HTML code possible, excluding Javascript, visual basic and css, where not closely necessary. These aspects contain also a series of the councils for the server settings, using the robot.txt files, and so on.

Quality requirements for the site

This part of the rules is the most important, because not respect of some of them can induce Google to penalize the website, as it declares explicitly. First of all Google insists to create your site for your visitors, and not for search engines. The fact is that if the site is enough good to attract attention of the surfers, the same should happened with the search engines, obviously if the site respects Google policy. There are the list of the “dangerous” actions that can cause the penalization or, still worse, expulsion of the site from the search results of Google. It’s prohibited use of hidden text (very used practice in the past, still remained in the memory of some webmaster), cloaking, the practice to show different pages to search engines and to visitors, duplicate content copied from other sites, and so-called doorway pages, the pages wrote only for the search engines, in order to obtain the placing for the several keywords.

On the other pages, connected to this with the guidelines, some details are explained, but the new ones can be found, too. One of this, very important, is the concept of the natural link, the fact that the site are linked spontaneously by other sites, duo to its quality. This concept produces another rule: no pay link, because buy links to own site isn’t natural. And here is another catch: also the links that link sponsors can be considered as pay link and your site can be penalized for this.

This rule is debatable, but the master (read Google) has always reason, so what can we do to resolve the problem.? Nothing fear, the solution is very simple and also confirmed by Google: it’s enough to insert the attribute rel=”nofollow” in all links that go to sponsors’ site.

More about Nofollow tag

2009-02-11T13:40:00.001-08:00

Few days ago I was contacted by a webmaster that wanted to exchange index page link with one my site. I made a detailed analysis of his site, the thing I always do to be sure that it’s a good trade, and I discover that he has more then hundred links, about 130 if I remember well, on the index page, where my link should be inserted. One of the rule that I respect when I trade links is to not make exchange with pages with mode then 100 links (I consider together external and internal links), because this is against Google policy.

I responded to the webmaster that I’m not interested and I explained the reason. He let me know that for more then 60 links on the his page have nofollow tag, so he support the thesis that he has only about 70 links. I thought about and I concluded that nofollow tag shouldn’t influence the page rank vale passed to the linked page, because the concept is, as we can see from page rank formula, that the total number of links represent the probability that one of them would be clicked by a surfer that visits the site. So nofollow tag, that isn’t visible for a normal surfer (you must open the html source to see it), doesn’t increase the probability that other links, without it, be chosen by visitor.

I sent an e-mail to the webmaster, and I said him that I’m not interested due to my opinion that nofollow tag doesn’t change the real page rank values passed. I’m not really sure that my opinion is really right, but I put it in my know-how notes. Of course, the webmaster didn’t share my thought, but at the end of the story, we didn’t make a trade.

I want to conclude this article with ask a question that this days I make to me: where will be the next Google update of Tool Bar PR, and if Google will respect the regularity of this as it did the past year. However, Google updated at the end of January, but that update wasn’t visible on the Tool Bar.

Page Rank updated the last day of the year

2008-12-31T07:20:00.001-08:00

This year, 2008, Google was updating very regularly, each 2 months, so everybody was expecting an update at November this year, but Google disappointed us, and lot of us webmasters thought that the regularity of the updating was finished and went back in the past, when this event seemed to be very casual. Today morning I switched on my modem and took up Internet connection, wanting to make some control about some of my new sites. I opened one of them and wow, there was Page Rank on the Tool Bar. After that, I controlled some my old sites and I noticed that there were some changes in PR, so Google was really updated it’s Tool Bar page rank. For all webmasters that work seriously this is a nice gift for the end of the year. Lets see the updates of Google this year, with some approximation: January 10, February 28, May 1, July 27, September 27 and finally December 31. Only this last one, is over 3 months.

Generally, my sites went very well with this last update. For some less important sites I lost some PR but the major part earned something, so now I have 2 sites with PR5, and that isn’t bad. I hope that this will take some money too, from my Internet business.

Hopping that this update was good for you too, I wish you happy new Year, and let your sites have good Page Rank and be on the first page of Google and other search engines. Happy new Year to all of you.

Pay attention while trading link

2008-11-10T06:15:00.000-08:00

While you trade link with another site you must pay attention specially to one thing to avoid to be cheated. There are lot of webmaster that try to take advantage of the trade, taking backlink from you, without giving one back to you, and you can’t know if this happens if you don’t examine HTML code of the page where your link should be present. There are two most diffused technique to do this cheat.

There are webmaster who put in the head code of the page meta tag noindex for robots. This tag “forbids” to robot to elaborate the page. In this mode, when robot/spider of some search engine visits this page, he doesn’t index it, and you haven’t the link to your sites. The head meta tag mentioned is wrote like this: <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> .

Other webmaster instead use attribute nofollow in the anchor tag. This attribute says to search engine’s robots not to follow the link at which the attribute is related, and even here no backlink for your site. An example of this technique is this
<a href="http://www.mysite.com" rel="nofollow">Link to my site </a>
This concept can be done using meta tag, too, inserting the attribute nofollow. It’s less used way while all links on the page are not followed, including the inner links of the same site, and this is disadvantage for the webmaster who apply this method

When I exchange link with somebody, I always control inner code of page to see if there are some of this tags, and I make other 2 controls: I control if the page with my link is accessible from the main page of the site (often non honest webmaster hide the page from the rest of the site), and if the page is present in the Google cash: if not, maybe robot.txt prevent the page from scanning, so, in this case, I control the robot.txt file, too.

The rules of the Web communication: 7 rules of the digital darwinism

2008-10-20T02:13:00.000-07:00

At the end of the 1999 and the beginning of the 2000, Evan Schwartz wrote a very interesting and useful book: “Digital darwinism”. The book was written in the time when Internet was on the top of its potential. The main point of the entire book is based on one simple concept, the theory of the evolution, already existing inside firms all over the world. The idea that Schwartz introduces it’s easy, in the nature you must be strong and adapt yourself in front of the changes, if you don’t adapt yourself you will be eaten . The same thing is with Internet. Today, we are all living in a dynamic world which is characterized by Internet and if you are not able to understand the new rules of the game you are out. It is also very important to underline the fact that Internet as our entire society is dynamic, everything is changing so quickly and Ewan Shwartz is helping us to understand this new, dynamic world by giving us some essential rules. Here are the rules:

1.You must create the name that solves problems for your future clients, you must enter in their heads and then create your brand. This is the only way to understand the customer. For creating a steady brand you need 4 things: distinction, significance, reputation and knowledge.

2. You don’t have to influence prices, leave them to follow the law of the request and offer. Remember that consumer know better the market and the offer but the producer knows better the consumer.

3. Create affiliate program and let your affiliate do marketing for you. The affiliate program was introduced in the 1996 by Amazon.com and it had great success. And remember to motivate your affiliates by giving them good percentage because if you don’t give a good percentage probably they will search for another affiliate program.

4. You need to suggest cumulative offers of information and services, because you need to justify the price you are asking. Remember to be original and exclusive and you will create the fidelity for your customers.

5. Sell before and then produce. Only when you have already sold your product it will be made in factory and this is very important because you don’t need warehouse anymore. But remember there is a negative consequence because: we are living in a world where people want exclusive products and if you already have made product and at the end you don’t sell it probably you will not be able to sell it anymore because it’s unique.

6. Give new value to transactions.

7. Integrate everything you can with online commerce and check out that your site is available not only from computers and use “smart card”, they have a microchip and they are easily carried. Remember that online commerce must be integrated with one physical point.

Reciprocal vs. non reciprocal link exchange

2008-10-09T03:10:00.000-07:00

Link exchange with other webmasters is a good way to increase the number of links to own site. Reciprocal link exchange consists in putting the links on the two sites that trade links. Site A links site B, and site B links site A. The links can be inserted on index or link page. There are lot of webmaster that, for various reasons, don’t want to do reciprocal exchange. One of the most explicated is the fact that from August 2007 Google introduced a new policy which said that excessive number of reciprocal links can be penalized. Please note that on Google policy pages the “excessive number” isn’t quantified, and I’m sure that, lets say 50 reciprocal links are not excessive (reed carefully the page). The other reason, more ancient, is that putting a link on the own page drains the PR of the page (this fact is evident from the formula for PR calculation), and at this point was born non reciprocal linkage. There are two main modes to do non reciprocal linkage.

3 way link
Webmaster 1 has site A, while Webmaster 2 has sites B, and C. In the 3 way link site A links site B, and receives link from site C. In the correct trade, site B should link site C, too, but often this not happened. If I’m Webmaster 1, those with 1 site only (site A, in this case), I normally don’t accept this kind of exchange. You can ask me, why? Because there are many webmaster that grow site C (the site that link me) for this purpose, to give a link, and after a while they didn’t care more about, or brutally cut off the links towards this site, so I don’t receive an adequate PR from this site. In the reciprocal exchange, I’m sure that the site that links me is supported at least by the link from my site.

4 way link
4 way link trade is similar as 3 way, but both webmasters have 2 sites, and they link one site, and receive the link from the other. It’s better way (each of them can be dishonest :) then 3 way link, specially if two sites of the same webmaster are linked between them.

By the way, Google continues to update ToolBar Page Rank very regularly, each 2 months. The last update was about Sept. 27, but I saw results of this update from statistics of my sites already about Sept. 10. As usually happens, some of my sites improved the position, but some others lost rank on Google.

Trade link with directories

2008-09-11T11:14:00.000-07:00

One of the bast way to have links towards your site is to submit it to the web directories. It’s some kind of reciprocal link trade: they put your link on their pages, and you put their link on yours, usually, link page. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find good directories to submit your site.
When I say «a good directory», I think primarily that:

category pages should be static;

the sites listed should be linked with static URL;

the category pages should have good PR and not so much links on page;

shouldn’t have too much pages for one categories (when you submit your site you are on the first page, but after 3 months, your link will finish at the fifth page, that has no PR.

Example of static page (URL): www.mydir.com/bussines.htm
Example of dynamic page (URL): www.mydir.com?cat=12

A good directory will pass PR to your site. Here is a directory that I intend as a good one (excluding the fact that not all category pages have PR). All pages, and links are static, there are not too much links on page (maybe the fact that some pages are rather empty penalises PR of the same pages), and the pages with PR have decent 3 rank.

There are also directories that will list your site for free, without reciprocal link, and in this case doesn’t meter if the page is dynamic, with dynamic link, without PR; the link is free, so it’s your convenience to have it.

It’s not a good idea to submit to the pay directories, those that insert your link without reciprocal link, but you must pay for the service. This kind of listings are in contrast with Google policy, and Google penalises this links.

Google becomes active and a little strange

2008-06-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

Seems that Google changed tactics about toolbar PageRank updating: after very rarely updating last year (only 3 updates, with an inactive period of 6 months), this year Google updates frequently, with very regular intervals. At the start of May it made third update; the first was at the start of January, and the second at the end of February, practically each 2 months. This fact facilitates a lot the work of all those webmasters that work constantly to improve page rank of their sites.

The last 2 or 3 updates there is a strange thing: often happens that index/home page has a good PR, while the inner pages of the site, linked from the index page, have not PR. In some cases, some inner pages have PR, while the others no.

Is this a result of some error in the Google’s software, or it’s a “desired error”, as what happen with the representation of back links, because Google don’t want give away all the information about the site, it’s difficult to say. Maybe it has something to do with a new policy from August 2007, that penalizes too much reciprocal links: it’s very usual to have the same, inner, links on all the pages of one site.

The last curiosity: Google updated Page Rank, without updating the toolbar, about May, 15. I know this, because one my site lost in this occasion a lot of traffic. I was at the first page of the Google’s search results for one rather used keyword, and I had about 1500-2000 visitors/day from Google. After I lost my position on the first page (now I’m on the second page), I have only about 200 visitors per day.

Google is updating

2008-03-02T02:18:00.000-08:00

Google is updating ToolBar Page Rank, and this days new PageRank will be visible to everybady. My conclusion is based on the fact that, in this moment, various Google’s data center show different PR for some sites, and this is a sight that the update is in the process. The last update happened about 2 months ago, and seems that Google take a rhythm, and updates rather regularly.
Lets see what kind of surprise will reserve us this time.

Recapitulation of real Page Rank values

2008-01-02T03:44:00.000-08:00

Here is a table with the intervals of real Page Rank values.


        ACCURATE METHOD     SIMPLIFIED METHOD
  PR    Minimum Maximum     Minimum   Maximum
Toolbar   Value   Value       Value     Value
   0          1       6           1         9
   1          7      48          10        99
   2         49     342         100       999
   3        343   2.400       1.000     9.999
   4      2.401  16.806      10.000    99.999
   5     16.807 117.648     100.000   999.999
   6    117.649 823.542   1.000.000 9.999.999

We will make reference to the real values of the accurate method.

Well, we made a new web site and we go hunting Page Rank. We want to reach at least a PR3 in the next Google update. Lets see how much link, and of what quality, we must have to reach our objective.

To have a PR3, our site must receive a minimum real value of 343 (as from the table above). Lets suppose that the links to our site come from PR3 pages with about 30 links for page: each of this page passes a value of 257 (the minimum value for PR3 from the first article), divided by 30 are 8,57. So, 343/8,57 = 40 pages of this kind must link our site.

It’s a hard work to find 30 pages with this characteristics. We can try to submit our site to directories, to top lists that use direct link, and to trade link with other webmasters.

Toolbar’s Page Rank updated

2007-10-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

Finally, after a long waiting, 26th October Google updated Toolbar’s Page Rank, too. Why did I use the word too?

Because the real value of Page Rank updates regularly, each 2-3 weeks, while the Toolbar’s value updates rarely: the last update was in April, 6 months ago.

The prove of this fact is the substantial changes in Google’s rank of some sites, in some periods, due to this invisible updates, not supported by Toolbar update.

Simplified method of Page Rank Calculation

2007-10-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

In the previous article an accurate method to calculate Page Rank was exposed. For everybody that found that method too complicated, here is a simplified method, obviously less accurate.

To calculate a minimum page rank real value that one page passes to another page, after number 1 we must add as much zeros as the value of Toolbar’s Page Rank is, multiply by 0,75 and divide
It by total number of links present on the same page. An example: suppose that we examine a PR3 page with 34 links. This page passes real value of

1000 x 0,75 / 34 = 22,05

The maximum value is this value multiplied by 10, that is 220,5.

Using method from the previous article, we would have the minimum value 257/34 = 7,56, and the maximum value 1800/34 = 52,94, the values more lower then those obtained with simplified method.

To transform the Page Rank real value in Toolbar’s Page Rank, we must simply count the number of characters of the number that presents the real value, and decrement the count by 1. For example, one page has real Page Rank value of 3419: there are 4 characters, less 1, so Toolbar’s Page Rank value is 3.

The values previously calculated would give Toolbar’s Page Rank:
- for simplified method we have real value 22,05: 2 characters less 1, so we have PR1;
- for accurate method we have real value 7,56: log(7,56)/log(7) = 1,04, so PR is 1.

How to calculate Page Rank

2007-09-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

Page Rank is a measure of the popularity of a web page. More pages link one page, this page will have a bigger Page Rank.

It is very useful for us, webmasters, to know the value of Page Rank that our page receives from pages that link it. To have this information, we need data for each page that links to our page: the real value of Page Rank and the total numbers of links on the page.

The value of Page Rank that we know is those that we can read from Google’s Toolbar. That value is a logarithmic representation of the real value. I will assume that the base of logarithm is 7 (the real value isn’t known).

The formula that is used to calculate the real value of Page Rank that one page (lets call it page A) passes to another page (lets call it page X) is:

PR[Xa] = d * ( PR[A] / C[A])

With words: the Page Rank that the page X receive from the page A (PR[Xa]) is obtained dividing the real Page Rank value of the page A (PR[A]) by total number of links on this page (C[A]) and multiplying by dumping factor (d). I will assume that the value of dumping factor is 0,75 (the real value isn’t known).

The total value of Page Rank of page X is the sum of all contributions that the page receives from the pages that link it. For example, if the page X is linked by pages A, B, C and D, the real value of Page Rank will be:

PR[X] = PR[Xa] + PR[Xb] + PR[Xc] + PR[Xd]

Using this information, we can produce a table with ranges of real values of Page Rank that one page (A), with a certain Page Rank, read from Google’s Toolbar, gives to an another page (X), supposing that on the page A there is only one link, to page X.


  PR    Minimum  Maximum
toolbar  Value    Value
   0         1        4
   1         5       36
   2        37      256
   3       257    1.800
   4     1.801   12.604
   5    12.605   88.236
   6    88.237  617.656

Attention: there are not real values of Page Rank, but real values passed from one page to another.

The minimum values are obtained raising number 7 (base of logarithm) to the PR power and multiplying by 0,75 (dumping factor), for example: the minimum value of Toolbar’s Page Rank 5 is (7^5)*0,75 = 12.605.

The maximum values are obtained simply by decrementing by one the minimum value of the superior Page Rank, for example: the maximum value of Toolbar’s Page Rank 5 is 88.237-1 = 88.236.

Now, to have real value that one page pass to our page, we must take the real value of Page Rank of that page from the table and divide it by total number of links, present on the same page. Here is the problem. What value to take from the table: the minimum or the maximum one, or an average?

It’s impossible to resolve this problem because we don’t know exact value of Page Rank, but only an interval of values. Personally, I always work with minimum value so, in this mode, I’m sure that my calculations are underestimated.

An another problem to resolve is how to find the number of links on the page that we examine? There are Internet sites that offer free tools with which we can obtain this information.

At the end of all calculations, summing Page Ranks that we receive from any page that link our page, we have a real value of Page Rank of our page. Lets suppose that this value is 780. To get an equivalent Toolbar’s Page Rank, we have to calculate logarithm to base 7 of this value. Normal calculators have not this function, so we can calculate it using logarithm on base 10, in this mode: log(780) / log(7) = 3,4. Toolbar’s Page Rank is always represented as an integer number, simply ignoring the decimal part of result, so Toolbar’s Page Rank will be 3.

Introduction with the opening of this blog for Webmasters

2007-09-17T07:16:00.000-07:00

There is no need to try to explain the importance of Google’s Page Rank. Every webmaster knows that the best internet traffic comes from search engines, and Google, in this moment, is the most important. So, the main task for a webmaster is to get his site placed as high as possible in Google search results.

Everybody also know that to be placed in first positions the page must be well written, with the selected keyword well spreads in the titles and in the text of the body, that the page must have a lot of incoming links (the link that link the page from other sites/pages), that those incoming link must use the selected keyword as link text, and that the page must have a good Page Rank.

It seems to me that many webmasters do not fully understand the concept of Page Rank and how to obtain it. In this blog I will try to address some of the arguments that I frequently discussed with other webmasters in order to express my opinion regarding this issue.

I used this introduction to tell immediately on, due to me, very important fact. All webmasters that work hardly to place their sites at the firsts positions of searching results, base their efforts using information that have and that often are not very reliable, and coming from different fonts.

Google doesn’t give much referent points, and frequently those points can be interpreted in different ways. Google recommends to webmasters to make sites for surfers, not for SE placement, and to look own sites with the critical eye of visitors, to understand better the quality and the potential of them. You must ask yourself: “Will my visitors find those they are looking for”? I recommend the same thing in the different way, to look the site white the eyes of Google, and to ask yourself: “If I were Google, what should I think about my site”?