Big news in the search industry…Google has finally updated their PageRank system. It’s been a long time since the last update. There was a lot of speculation on when this was going to happen; many “experts” were banking on July and Aug 2007…that didn’t happen. Sep 2007 was a popular guess…nope. So, then comes late Oct and all of the sudden the PageRank changes.

Depending upon what kind of site you have and the activities that you have been conducting determines how you feel about the latest PageRank update. I’ve seen many sites that have dropped in PageRank as a result of this last update…I’m sure those sites are a little bummed. I’m happy to report that every single one of our client’s sites have experienced a significant increase in their PageRank (I’m now patting myself on the back).

Ok…I know what all you SEO’s are thinking right now…PageRank doesn’t mean a whole lot when it comes to search results, and I agree. PageRank can be a very misleading measure of a site…just because you have a good/bad PR doesn’t mean that it correlates with search results. However, as most of you know, webmasters are very hesitant to link out to a site with no PR. So, when a webmaster is considering linking to your site they will always do a cursory analysis of your site’s metrics; PR being one of those metrics they will inevitably look at. If your site has a PR0, then you probably won’t get any link-love from them. But, if your site has a PR2 or 3, they might be a little more willing to give you some lovin’.

There is also a perceived value in high PR…there are literally millions of people who evaluate pages based solely on PR. This method of evaluation should make any knowledgeable SEO shutter with disgust…but at the same time, we cannot ignore the power. PR is a useful marketing tool for anyone involved in Internet marketing. Not everyone that you deal with will know that PR is really an unreliable measure and you don’t have the time to explain it to them. So, why not embrace it and use it to your advantage.

So, get out there, puff up your feathers a little bit and tout that new PR.

Today we’ve created a new simple tool you can use to see the number of links that point at your website (back links). All data is taken from Yahoo! site explorer. This tool is useful in determining the amount of work necessary to catch up to your competitors’ web sites, in terms of link popularity.  More work will be done in the future to improve the tool’s function, more to come later…

Once in a while I read craig’s list to see who’s offering what seo service at what price. There will be advertisements for “seo link building services” and a lot of the time you will hear people use the term “PageRank” or “PR” as an indication of a web page’s importance. They will say they can get you lots of links from high page ranking sites. This may be true, but why is it that nobody uses the term “cache date” as a page’s value indicator? It would seem the more often a spider caches or indexes a page, the more importance a search engine is giving the page since it is always checking for new updates - and checking a page’s cache date is easy, just click on the link that says “Cached” in the search results and look near the top of the page.

Take the example a high page ranking directory: uncover the net. It appears it has been dropped from the Google index. Try running a search for “site:uncoverthenet.com“, you won’t get anything. Yet if you browse to their home page they still retain a high page rank. Uncover the net has a PR of 6! And since we know pages that are dropped from Google’s index don’t pass much link juice (or any) it would seem page rank is not a good indicator and these people advertising their link building services are either ignorant or just playing on the ignorance of people looking for “SEO” services.

I recently was given the chance to perform technical optimize on an e-commerce site that dealt with selling vacation packages and cruises… Regardless of what they were selling it’s always good to follow a few simple rules for best optimization practices:

Use descriptive URLs

It’s best to have descriptive, static looking URLs on your site. For example:

http://www.mysite.com/cruises-1.html

looks a heck of a lot better than:

http://www.mysite.com/index.php?product_id=1&
category_id=22&cart_session_variable=somelongstrangetexthere

and it’s easier for your customers to remember when and if they decide to return to your site. Search engines also like simple, descriptive page names that relate to what your page is about.

E-commerce URL Plugins

If you’re using the popular zen-cart or oscommerce shopping carts you may want to give Magic SEO URL a whirl as this was a fairly simple install for both carts, it works very well and their support staff is responsive. The only downside is that the $89 plugin license works with just one site at a time and the author places a non-removable link at the bottom of your site’s index page.

Use hyphens, not underscores

Try to use hyphens “-” and not underscores “_” when using spaces to separate keywords within your page names.

Keep your pages closer to your root directory

A page at http://mysite.com/pageA.html can be seen as more important under certain circumstances than a page such as http://mysite.com/directory1/directory2/pageA.html

If you must use page variables…

If you absolutely must use dynamic looking URLs, all is not lost. Try to keep the number of page variables at two or less and nothing too long or funky looking. DO NOT use the term “id” in your variables. Google has been known to disregard pages using this variable identifier.

After you’ve spent the last 30 minutes shopping online for that new movie DVD or gift idea for ma’s birthday and you’ve got your credit card ready in hand, you end up at a payment/checkout page that says “warning: this page contains secure and non-secure items. Select yes to continue”. Still feel like giving out your credit card info? Yea, me neither. This is usually the case when an HTTPS web page references items from the HTTP protocol - or more specifically - when the web master has placed the standard Google Analytics code onto the HTTPS page.

Google has analytics tracking code specifically for HTTPS pages, and to my surprise, the same HTTPS code will work when placed on non secure pages:

You can add this secure code to both secure and non-secure pages of your site

Straight from their website. Pretty nifty, so why even bother with the non secure (HTTP) analytics tracking code? I asked a Google representative that very same question and they said it was from a time before HTTPS tracking was in demand and a new version of the tracking was in development… ok, so we’ll have to change it again some day? Happy tracking until then!