A page may be assigned a rank of zero if Google crawls very few sites that link to it. Additionally, pages
recently added to the Google index may also show a PageRank of zero because they haven’t been crawled by
Googlebot yet and haven’t been given a rank score. A page’s PageRank score may increase naturally with
subsequent crawls, so this shouldn’t be a cause for concern.

Don’t get confused with what PageRank really means. Google PageRank is a number based on a calculation or
formula; It is not the rank of your page in the Google search results. Also, the word PageRank comes from one
of the formula’s original authors, Larry Page. The word PageRank does not imply the ranking of web pages.
Google PageRank is often referred to simply as PR.

The number we see on the Google Toolbar is only updated once every three months. Therefore, if a page was
created after a certain date, it will not have its PR or “Page Rank” updated until the next update. For example,
if the last PR update was based on pages created before December 1st, then any page created after December
1st will automatically have a PR0 because it simply missed the cutoff date. Therefore, if you look at that page
on December 31st, the page could have a lot of good links going to it and it might be worth a lot to you if
that page links to you, but it could potentially still show up as a PR0 only because it missed the deadline.

To learn more about PageRank, please see http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

I know you’ve heard all about Google site maps. But if you were like me you only thought they would be useful for large complex sites. I have recently learned this is not the case.

Several months ago I started doing some SEO on a new client. They had the website up for a little over a year and Google never indexed past the first page. After checking for html errors, creating a sitemap page in the site, being sure there were text links to the interior pages and adding many links to the site, after a few months Google had still not indexed past the first page. Read on …

Here is an interesting tool provided by netcraft.com. Much of the information provided can be found in a who is search. However some of the interesting information provided includes, the NetBlock owner (which may be different than the domain server who the hosting is bought from), the date it was first seen, and the history of the sites hosting changes.

Another interesting feature that can be requested is an uptime graph. Once you start the process they will monitor the site over the next few days, come back to the site later and you can see how the hosting company was doing over that period of time. Useful if you’re thinking of changing to another hosting company.

This tool also provides information on what type of servers the site is being hosted on, the OS used, and other hosting details. By adding the main domain ie “google.com” you can get a list of all the subdomains for that domain.

This can be some interesting information when deciding if you want to have a site as a link partner, helping you to identify sites that might be considered in a “Bad Neighborhood”.

You can find the tool at http://searchdns.netcraft.com/

OK, so I’m not being very original here, however I found some points in one of Matt’s posts that I though would be interesting to bring out in case you missed them. Actually these points come from Vanessa Fox, a guest blogger on Matt’s blog.

Most of these tips are confirmations of what I already suspected, but it is always nice to know when we are on the right track.

First URL formatting, hyphens vs. underscores does it really matter? Read on …

Most of us by now know that Google has been promoting FireFox via the Google search bar plug-in, to the tune of $1.00 for every referral you give them that downloads the browser. Personally I’ve already collected a few dollars from referring to the download from one of my sites.

However, for but a brief moment Google stepped up it’s campaign by showing an advertisement on it’s Google search page. Being that this is by far the most used search engine this brief campaign could have been seen as an endorsement from Google by Thousands? Tens of thousands? of searchers in that brief time. Read on …

Much of the work done by a Webmaster requires repeating the same task over and over. Not only does this waste time but also resources that could be used to further fill the pocket with greenstuff! One task that I’ve found to be a huge timewaster is processing images to be used in eCommerce websites. Common things that need to be done to each picture used are, resizing, optimizing, and placing a watermark on images. There are however ways to relieve much of this drudgery. Read on …

From a recent PR update or something like it, it seems that Google is trying to tweak it’s PR algo.

Many new sites are popping up with high PRs while others sites that should, according to previous expectations, go up in PR stay dormant or drop dramatically. From all these changes recently it is pretty obvious that Google is tweaking and testing their new PR algo, which seems to be heading in a bit of a different direction from the old.

From what I have seen on my sites and some others that have reported on webmaster forums it seems that the premature algo is putting more emphasis on “crawlibility” (quoting Matt Cutts), deep linking, and new content. Blogs, forums, and sites that are updated often with mass amounts of pages of content are getting higher rankings while older smaller sites are staying the same or dropping, which could lead me to believe that Google is quite aware that webmasters are the main audience of the PR, and that they hold a somewhat superficial control over some webmaster by being able to control it, so maybe…they are just trying to get what they want: more pages, cleaner pages, and more often.

So while I think all linking theory will still hold up, as it is the only way to determine a sites popularity, I think Google is starting to put a lot more emphasis on cleaner large content sites, bot-candy, and the new PR number will be a representation of it.

So what is this mean?
For one thing I think the sand-box is definitely dead.

What might have caused this drastic change?
Well I think Google noticed how MSNs algo was getting pretty good, like many others on the web, and their apparent emphasis on fresh content might have swayed Google to ditch the sand-box and other nuances dealing with age.

All this is nice, but lets just hope Google doesn’t make a mess out of this one, the first taste of this new algo has been quite bitter, even with rises.

Ah, the temptation. Find a competitor who is doing well in the SERPs, and instead of trying to beat them in the organic searches, just purchase their name in Adwords. Watch the visitors start pouring in, as well as maybe a lawsuit. And thus you have “Edina Realty, Inc. v. TheMLSonline.com”. Read on …

Still looking for ways to add a link to your website? Of course you are! Here is an interesting idea. Write reviews. When selecting a new book from Amazon I frequently check the reviews to see what other people thought of it before I buy. It dawned on me that this might be another way to build some name recognition for my site and perhaps get a high PR link out of it. Read on …

Today we’ll be looking at the dangers of having a website grow too fast and the solutions to those problems if they do arise. Just like a tree a website starts out as a seed, an idea. It doesn’t matter what the site is about, it probably started out as a one page website and slowly began to grow.

Some webmasters never intend to have their site become large, because it’s a personal site or something along those lines. However, there are many webmasters who begin sites with ideas that become very popular (e.g. digg.com). Sometimes they are unaware of how popular these sites can be or begin doing things that weaken the website by branching into too many areas.
Read on …