It appears that overnight Google has changed how PageRank ranks sites, several very high profile web sites have been affected by this change and lost 2-3 rankings. The speculation is it is directly caused by web sites having paid links either to bad neighborhoods or just having them at all. It seems like Google is going head-strong into a shift towards ranking web sites poorly depending on where they link and if it is paid or not. I have compiled a list from various sources about the high-profile sites that have lost significant ranking.

This move is furthering the shift that a lot of people have been seeing away from not only PageRank, but possible away from Google for everything. Some sites have lost so much ranking they don’t even show up for their names, such as John Chow. (more…)

Popularity: 3%

It appears as though your robots.txt file that tells search engines what to crawl and what not to crawl is being indexed by Google. This means all those pages/files that you don’t want crawled are available to the general public by just doing a Google search for the robots.txt file. Oddly enough they are even getting PageRanks. (more…)

Popularity: 4%

As we have all heard, titles are a very important part of anything. Especially when it comes to designing web sites, the title says it all. The title element is how your site is understood by your visitor and also by search robots. In the past people would stuff their titles with as many keywords as they could think of to ensure that search engines would pick up the keywords and they would rank higher. That really isn’t the point and so search robots ever since have given less importance to titles. (more…)

Popularity: 4%

The guys over at 97th floor have been testing and now released to the public a Firefox extension that adds a status bar to the bottom of Firefox and lists Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and del.icio.us numbers for the current page you are on. The Social Media for Firefox extension is quick and easy way to check all of the sites without having to visit them or hope the site has the option built in. This new extension is has been an awesome addition to my status bar where I have Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox and Search Status extensions.

It also adds the functionality on the aforementioned sites of showing what the others sites are ranked at for that page. Which is an awesome little feature for all of the social marke… media web sites out there.

Popularity: 5%

I am here to answer just that question. There has been a lot of mystery I have gathered from fellow web developers about the benefits of using a robots.txt. Most are under the false impression that the only purpose for this text file is to tell search robots not to index a certain section of their site. This isn’t the case at all! There are much more useful reasons to be using a Robots.txt that have to do very much with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that most people don’t realize. (more…)

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This is part one of generating traffic to your web site through various marketing methods, this topic is of course about organic marketing. Organic marketing is basically word of mouth and being able to generate interest in your service/ product/ web site through bringing it up on topic with people in person and in online communities. If done right you can generate more quality traffic then almost any other method. (more…)

Popularity: 2%