December 31, 2008

Page Rank updated the last day of the year

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.

November 10, 2008

Pay attention while trading link

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.

October 20, 2008

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

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.

October 9, 2008

Reciprocal vs. non reciprocal link exchange

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.

September 11, 2008

Trade link with directories

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.

June 5, 2008

Google becomes active and a little strange

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.

March 2, 2008

Google is updating

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.

January 2, 2008

Recapitulation of real Page Rank values

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.