Category Archives: Google

PR Sculpting Now Obsolete: So What? Why You Shouldn’t Worry

So Google apparently hasn’t officially confirmed that yet, but now every SEO on the planet is aware of its decision to ignore PageRank sculpting.

If you used nofollow to change how PR flowed within your site, or even Javascript links, that era of easy optimization may be over.

I always knew it would be discounted one day, it was just a matter of time. This technique was so publicized and so abused that Google had to step in.

So the question is: should we start worrying about how we’re going to sculpt PageRank now? Would it be impossible to obtain the same kind of results without PR sculpting (or at least the methods we used to use)?

The answer is a straight NO. In fact, no SEO needs to worry at all.

Remember back in 2005 when every SEO was using link exchange techniques to build links and increase their PageRank? What happened when Google decided to discount these types of links? Did we all give up our optimization campaigns? Nope, we just learned the new rules of the game, we built better links which lead to better SERPs and better websites (at least outgoing links on a page were more useful to the user than reciprocate links).

Back to PR sculpting: you get the point, it’s not the end of the world. If Google really starts to depreciate it, that means that all webmasters are now on an equal footing.

To beat your competitors, you just need to be smarter. Instead of throwing nofollow tags on your “Contact” of “About Us” page links on your 5 page site (which really was useless and could raise flags easily), you’ll now have to organize links in a more clever way.

Based on your keyword research data, add links to your primary pages from your homepage and other important pages in terms of linking value (or link juice, anchor text value, PR, whatever).

At the end it will be the same, but unlike nofollow or Javascript techniques, that technique is not borderline and is perfectly acceptable by Google.

Every webmaster seemed to be using PR sculpting these days, but not all of them are going to be motivated enough to build better internal links, that’s your chance to beat them if you’re smart enough.

Google Chrome User Agent

Google Chrome launched with this user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Traditional web analytics solutions such as Google Analytics will display Chrome visits under the Firefox section. You’ll need to wait for the future updates of your web analytics solution to identify Chrome visits separately.

If you want to see how many people are using Chrome to visit your site, the best is to look into your server logs.

Missing Things in Google Chrome (from a Developer Standpoint)

So I’ve been testing Google Chrome yesterday. The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s indeed fast. I’ve visited the same pages I usually visit with Firefox and it loaded much quickly.

What’s good is that each tab runs as its own process, so if there’s something wrong with one tab, it won’t affect the other ones and crash the whole thing.

Now, I’ve noticed a few things missing from Google Chrome that will not allow it to be the web developer’s favorite web browser:

– No extensions: Ouch! Extensions aren’t available right now but according to Matt Cutts, they will be soon.

– No “Open File” : I’ve tried to open an HTML page located on my computer to see how it renders with Chrome, but couldn’t find this option. Or maybe I missed something?

– No support for RSS: Chrome doesn’t seem to have a built-in RSS reader nor a shortcut to subscribe to a site’s RSS feed like on Firefox, the usual orange icon located in the toolbar.

Microsoft’s Testimony Before Congress Regarding Google-Doubleclick Merger: WTF?

So Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith is about to testify before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust regarding Google’s merger with Doubleclick.

I’m quite puzzled by one part of his testimony:

This country doesn’t permit a phone company to listen to what you say and use that information to target ads. The computer industry doesn’t permit a software company to record what you type and use that information to target ads. Yet with this merger, Google seeks to record almost everything you see and do on the Internet and use that information to target ads.

I really don’t get the sentence about recording personal information to influence ad targeting. Isn’t Microsoft doing the exact same thing with their AdCenter program? I mean, Adcenter’s specificity is that it uses demographic data to fine-tune targeting, such as sex, age, or income. If they’re not recording information about their users, where are they getting their demographic data from?

Sorry, Brad, but I don’t get it?

Can Google Update Its Whole Index in 14 Minutes?

A french SEO guy claims that Google is able to update its index in 14 minutes. The guy based his comment on a test he made: he published an article on his blog, which was appearing a few minutes later on Google Blog Search, and then directly on Google’s default web results. The guy also backs his comment with what a Google Engineer from Googleplex had supposedly said to a friend of his.
It could have been true if Google hasn’t announced a few months ago the launch of Universal Search, a new feature that consists of displaying different kinds of content such as Images, News, Videos, etc directly into web results.

What the guy noticed was just Universal Search in action, Google has displayed the blog post directly in their web results, and not only in their Blog Search results.

So it was not an update of their entire database, but rather just the displaying of a blog post based on the user’s query.

Source: Seo By the Sea 

Google’s Market Share In France Close To 90%

A few years ago, Altavista was the leading search engine in France. Immediately after Google launched its search engine there, people left Altavista to try this new and simple search engine, and didn’t turn back. Altavista was indeed becoming full of spammy pages and people were just annoyed with that.

A study made by French agency Xiti shows that Google’s market share is now close to 90% in this country, followed by Yahoo, MSN, Free etc whose market share has been going down for the last few years.

I don’t know what we should say about these figures? Should we be scared or happy?

Google Adsense Ads Get a New Look

Today, the Official Google Adsense blog announced a new format for their ads.

“You may have noticed that some of your ad units have started to look a little different lately — we’re happy to announce that, just in time for spring, we’ve given our standard ad units a fresh makeover. After extensive testing and research, we’ve found that the new formats are not only visually appealing to users, but they also perform even better for publishers and advertisers.”

With this new format, Google hopes that publishers, advertisers, and Google itself will make more money…

The defaul ads’ format now doesn’t have any border, and the “Ads by Goooooooogle” text link has been replaced by an image. The “Advertise on this site” link has also been removed.