Google really hates SEO people, those who perform search engine optimization. But why? Well, at least that’s what the following video explains about people doing SEO work: essentially SEO’s have a “parasitic relationship” with Google in a way that not only feeds off of them but brings Google down.

Does this mean that Google tries to kill the SEO business?

No, they just want to kill spammers or anyone who tries to move search results away from what the majority of people actually are looking for (under a given keyword search), i.e. spammers trying to put Viagra affiliate web sites at the top of search results for quick and easy gain. Sadly, there is little distinction between good SEO people and spammers, since we all have to follow the same rules and guidelines set forth by the search engines. But there is hope.

Leveraging interest of the general population

As the major search engines increase their search engine A.I., SEO can be thought of as moving away from manual link building and into the realm of natural buzz and interest of public relations, i.e. the most talked about articles and pages will show up first, not necessarily the content that has been submitted to directories a million times over for SEO purposes.

How can we generate interest and or “buzz”?

It’s not that directory submission are bad, some of them are good, like the Yahoo! directory, DMOZ and Business.com, links created in these directories have been known to be syndicated else where, and there may even be other quality niche directories worth your time depending on what market you’re optimizing for - but submitting your site to hundreds of directories is losing it’s value as the search engines get smarter. A better idea would be to create Google alerts for your top keyword competition (and URLs) to see where they are getting their directory links from.

Online profile sites can also be a good place to generate buzz, places where you can write a page of fresh content about your web site and generate some value to the reader, search engines love this. Some good places to start are: Squidoo, City Search and Merchant Circle.

Social media sites are a great place to leverage interesting material such that you can generate back links & interest if your content is actually worth talking about. Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit are among a few of the worthy sites. Having an article on the front page of a social media site such as Digg can generate thousands of free back links, this can be an efficient use of your SEO time.

Every morning I wake up and launch Sage (an RSS feed reader for Firefox), which is a great way to view a summary of all your favorite blog posts quickly. This morning I opened up an interesting little post, titled Yahoo Traffic Jam, from a company called Apogee Search.

The blog post pointed me at a press release on comScore that summarizes web traffic for May 2007. According to their analysis, Yahoo! sites garnered 10 million more unique visitors than Google sites during the entire month of May; 130MM and 120MM respectively. Also, Yahoo! ads had a greater reach to all internet traffic than did Google ads; 73% vs. 64%. My first instinct, after reading numbers like these, is to question their validity. Where did the numbers come from? How were the numbers obtained? How big was the sample size? If you scroll to the bottom of the comScore article you will see the following explanation:

This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

Anyone who’s suffered through a statistics class knows that a sample size of 2 million is more than enough to get an accurate measure of web traffic. So, what do these numbers really mean? After all, Google is still the behemoth that dominates 80%+ of search traffic, right? Well, according to these numbers, Google is coming in second place for unique visitors and I’m not so sure that we (SEO’ers) are targeting the right search engine.

Now, let me take a step back. More unique visitors to Yahoo! sites than Google sites does not mean that there are more searches done on Yahoo! than Google; I think that is fairly obvious. It simply means that more people are visiting the Yahoo! suite of sites, like Finance and Sports, instead of the Google suite. But to me, an internet marketer by trade, it means that there are more eyes on that Yahoo! suite than the Google suite and maybe we should re-think our targeting strategy a little to be more compliant with the actual results.

We all spend countless hours targeting both Yahoo! and Google, usually in proportion to the search traffic (approx. 15% and 80% respectively). But, with these numbers, does it make sense to spend a disproportionate amount of time targeting both of these giants? I really don’t know the answer to that unless I actually spend some time testing out the strategy to see its effects. I do know that I’m going to tweak my methodology a little to see what happens. Maybe there’s an opportunity, within these numbers, to see some gains in website traffic. What do you think?

The New York Times is reporting that Google keeps tweaking its search engine - and they’re right. Not only do the engineers at Google make manual modifications to the algorithm(s) that serve up results but the algorithm itself changes its own formula weights depending on, for example, where it recognizes spam coming from on a particular day to keep those “bad” results from showing up.

The article introduces one of Google’s top search engineers, Mr. Singhal, who is faced with the daunting task of making search results more relevant for it’s users. One problem Googlers were reporting as of last year (2006) was that search results were becoming a bit stale and not enough new or hot information was rising to the top of the SERPS. Obviously Google changes it’s formulas from time to time but to help tackle the issue, Singhal addresses

…the freshness problem, explaining that simply changing formulas to display more new pages results in lower-quality searches much of the time. He then unveiled his team’s solution: a mathematical model that tries to determine when users want new information and when they don’t. (And yes, like all Google initiatives, it had a name: QDF, for “query deserves freshness.”) THE QDF solution revolves around determining whether a topic is “hot.” If news sites or blog posts are actively writing about a topic, the model figures that it is one for which users are more likely to want current information. The model also examines Google’s own stream of billions of search queries, which Mr. Singhal believes is an even better monitor of global enthusiasm about a particular subject.

This is very cool, freshness!

You may have noticed that Google bought Feedburner recently and it seems to confirm what the New York Times are writing about in the above quote: Google wants to see who is writing about what’s hot so that they can improve the relevance of their search results to include new web content without including spam! Wow, Genius!

What does this mean for internet marketers? It means Google is helping us to better take advantage of the idea that the web is a series of conversations and channels - and if we can get our client’s brand(s) and ideas talked about in those streams of interest then we can more effectively drive traffic to our targets. This of course can result in happy clients

Today I noticed a funny change in the background picture on Google’s search page, then I ran into a few blogs that were reporting Google had changed it’s interface!

When a search term is queried, such as: “seo” or “marketing”, Google gives suggestions from it’s own service offerings that contain your search query, right on the new navigation bar. Also of note: Google’s service offerings are now atop the search box, so things like mail and images are now a little closer to reach.

It seems Google is now using what is referred to as a “Universal Search” that combines vertical search channels, as noted by SEO by the SEA:

Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a “Universal Search” system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.

This makes a little more sense now that we’ve seen Google service offerings pop up in the navigation bar when we do a search for something like “Bush”, it gives us “News Music Blogs Video Images Groups” that contain results from that search. Again, now we don’t have to search the different offerings that Google gives us - they search it for us right away the first time we execute a search query and the results are stored in the little links in the navigation bar!

So what’s the big deal? Obviously Google is making a change, but they are also giving the consumer more freedom to “find what they want” or a broader semantic search. So we all can now find those targeted ads just a little bit faster and over a large number of people using Google’s search, that adds up to a lot of $$$ flowing around the web.

Page Rank or “PageRank“, is a term that describes a link analysis algorithm, created by the founders of Google (back in 1995 as part of a research project at Stanford, with a finished prototype in 1998), which helps to determine a web page’s search engine rankings for a particular keyword search. PageRank is just one of many factors that Google relies on to rank results in their index, but is worth noting as important because Google uses this as the basis for all their online search tools/offerings.

Essentially, PageRank (PR) is a number, anywhere from 0 to 10, assigned to and spread out among a set of web documents. For example, if you have a website with 5 pages, your index (home) web page might have a PageRank of 6, while your sub pages may have a lesser PR of 3 or 4 (being a little less popular / less in-bound links). Some documents on your site may not even have page rank at all. Again, PR is spread out amongst the pages on your web site to help Google’s search spiders and index know which pages are the most important pages (on your site) to show in their search results for key word searches. PR helps to show which pages are the most relevant and which ones are not.

How do I check my site’s PageRank? You can download the “Google Toolbar” and install it into either your Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser. The Google Toolbar has a PageRank meter that you can check whenever you browse to a particular URL, very handy.

How is PageRank assigned on your website? PageRank relies on the democratic nature of the world wide web in that links to a given web page count as “votes” for that webpage, the more votes you get, the higher the PageRank and the better your chances of ranking high. So if web pages “B” and “C” both link to page “A” then page”A” has 2 votes. Likewise if page “A” points to page “B” then page “B” now has a vote from page “A”. It is thought that links from other web sites pointing at your web page are generally weighted more than links from your own internal web pages pointing back at your web site. Again, the more links you have pointing to your web page, generally a higher PageRank number is assigned to that web page. Google also takes into account the quality of the incoming links to your pages (links that are coming from web sites /web pages that have similar content and or theme as your web page) and not just the quantity.

PageRank is also thought to be based on a logarithmic scale of somewhere between a base 5 or 6, so your PageRank goes up when you reach a certain link level/threshold. If you are not familiar with logs don’t worry, here is a tutorial, and I will try to spoon-feed this to you For example: if PR was using a logarithmic base of 5, your web page will reach a PageRank of 3 when you have X number of links at or greater than 125 and less than 625 (125 <= X < 625). In this case the lower limit of 125 comes from 5^3 = 125 links, while the upper limit 625 comes from 5^4 = 625 links. Do you see how having your X number of links between 125 and 625 will always result in a logarithmic value of no less than 3 but no greater than 3? Another example, if you had 300 back-links to your web page, then obviously 125 <= 300 < 625, so the log base 5 of 300 will give you a number of something like 3.5439 (rounded off), which is no less than 3 but no greater than 3. But what if your link count gets bumped up at equal to or greater than 625, say at 626? Then it is thought your PageRank will increase from 3 to 4, since the number 626 gives a logarithmic result of exactly 4.0009933414339, which is no less than 4 and no greater than 4 while using a base of 5

The NoFollow hyperlink tag attribute is a new industry standard recently adopted by all major search engines to help people redistribute PageRank within their websites, i.e. stoping PageRank leaks from important pages to less important pages. It was also created to combat spam within blogs to help stop PageRank from being injected into third party sites that aren’t relevant, such as spam blog commentators who leave their web site URLs on blog entries in hopes of creating instant back-links, and ultimatley higher PageRank, to their web sites.

Also of note: there are web pages that rank higher in search results than other web pages that have a much higher PageRank - so PR is not an end all solution to where your web page ranks on a particular key word query. Besides, it wouldn’t make sense to base search results on one factor or one majority factor alone, people could game the system with ease by creating many spam back-links, resulting in spam search results = no good. PR just happens to be a single factor in the grand ranking scheme that Google has laid out.

If you remember only one thing about this article, remember this: PR can be used to tell the search engines which pages on your site are more important than others, depending on the keyword search context given. Read up more about how to tweak your web site’s PageRank to your benefit.

What is Google’s Supplemental Index? In 2003, Google started a special, separate index of web pages (called the supplemental index) that it will query if it fails to find good matches within its main web index for particular sets of keywords. The new index is like the extra section added to the very end of a book to give additional information or to correct previous errors. Sites that appear in the supplemental index are usually for obscure or unusual queries. They are sites that Google doesn’t really trust but also doesn’t want to just throw away. It’s like being sentenced to the digital jail for web pages - not good. Web sites will be flagged as a “Supplemental Result” next to the URL and date that Google shows for the listing.

For example: if you were to Google “site:junkmails.org“, you will see a list of supplemental results, vs Googling “News” which will show sites from the main search index.

The problem with the supplemental index is that once a site is listed as supplemental, the site will not rank very high for a particular search query because it takes a “back seat” to other sites in the main index. The other big problem with the supplemental index is that it becomes difficult to get a site out of the index. No one really knows how sites are categorized as supplemental or even how exactly to get a site out of the index: Google deems what sites are “unusual”, “obscure”, etc. and can place any web page that it wants to in this supplemental index, a little bit scary for anyone relying on web traffic to drive business.

Forbes has a nice little story on the index regarding “punished” or banned sites that fall into the “Google Hell” (Supplemental Index).

You can also check and see which pages of your site are in the Google Supplemental Index by Googling: “site:www.yoursite.com *** -view”

How do you keep your site from being indexed as supplemental? It is thought that Google indexes sites as “supplemental” when they are a duplicate or have near duplicate content as other (older) sites, pages that have little or no content and pages that used to have incoming links but no longer do. Here are a few good precautions to take for keeping your pages out of the supplemental index:

• Your pages should have enough content: Very short/small blog posts and other very brief pages sometimes can end up in the supplemental index.
• Make sure that your pages have enough unique content, from each other and from other pages on the Internet.
• Make sure that no one is duplicating your pages elsewhere on the Internet. This is probably the number one cause of being supplemental. You can run a search on some of the unique phrases in your page to see if other pages may be similar.
• Get more/better inbound links to your supplementally indexed pages. Place keywords that people search for in the anchor text of your new back links.