With the latest Google Toolbar Page Rank Update, I have been discussing this with several clients. It came to my attention that most people do not realize that at anytime you can get a real time snapshot of your websites current Page Rank according to Google.  Within Google webmaster tools, you can view what your current Google Page rank is in a way.  They do not offer you a specific number, but they do break it down into 4 catergories. High, Medium, Low and not yet assigned. It displays this in the form of a bar chart, offering an clear picture of how your websites current pages are valued based upon Google’s Page Rank.

To view this for your website, all you need to do is click on statistics and then crawl stats to view this information.

Assumptions can be made that your home page is probably the highest ranking page, so if you see a really small bar in the high or medium section this is most likely your home page.

At first you may look at this and feel somewhat perplexed by what does low, medium and high really mean. Based upon my experience, I can help with this:

Not Yet Assigned- would be a grey bar or no Google Page Rank.

Low- this puts your Page Rank Between PR0-PR3

Medium- this puts your Google Page Rank Between PR4-PR6

High- this puts your Google Page Rank between PR7-PR10

I was amazed at how many webmasters and website owners did not know that they can get a pretty clear picture of their current Google Page Rank and how to view this realtime.

I hope now, everyone does not feel that they need to sit around and wait for Google to do a Toolbar export to see their current website Page Rank. It is always available to you.

What would be cool, is if Google would just really show you the actual PR number of all your pages right in Google Webmaster tools, maybe some day.

Hope this helps.

As stated by Matt Cutts the Google Toolbar Export or update did begin on Friday July 25th 2008 and appears to be nearly completed. Does not look like there were too many wholesale changes, appears that some new sites got some PR and some old sites either went up and down. Appears to be little drama, and also appears that the general public is becoming somewhat disenchanted with the entire Google PR system.

It is becoming more and more evident that Google is making some serious changes to their algorithm. Webmasters around the world are seeing very inconsistent results. It appears that most webmasters agree that wholesale changes began on June 4th 2008, and have been going on ever since. I personally agree with the general population on webmasters. I have been seeing some major changes in results, on a multitude of websites. Some sites that were in the top 10 for say 15 to 20 keywords, bouncing all over down to 30 back up to 2 and so on. Other sites, maybe number 4 now, in 1 hour will be number 9 and then 15 minutes later back to number 3. One day last week, I was just hitting refresh on my browser and I could see the rankings changing real time, I also noticed the search results changing from IE to Firefox although I assume this was just the rapid changes in results being diaplsy only a few seconds apart, although you never know?

One thing I have noticed is, that the shuffling going on seems to be primarily from number 3-10, sites with number 1 ranking are staying put and the number 2 seems pretty solid, but after number 2 your guess is as good as mine as to where your ranking will be in the next 5 minutes.

I have two primary theories, the first one is that this is the new way Google will be displaying results, nearly real time shuffling. This will be with the hopes that people and seo (search engine optimization) companies, will not be able to really track a website’s search engine results. It is quite disturbing to see a site ranked number 3 one minute and number 10 the next. The difference in traffic from 3 to 10 can be 1000%.

My second theory is that Google is making major changes, and attemtping to implement a large scale change to their algorithm. While they are doing this they are constantly tweaking, testing and changing and this is causing the massive swings in results.

On a different topic, I am seeing penalties being potentially thrown around a lot more often, I am quite certain that in the last month I have seen or spoke to website owners and webmasters that are certain they have gotten penalties for certain keywords. They wake up one day with a -30 or -60, the problem is they appear to be somewhat short lived. The next day they will be bouncing all over the place, at times they can be 9 and 15 minutes later -90. I am not sure if this is also tied to the algorithm changes or if this is the “new way” of Google doing things.

In summary some crazy things are going on in Google’s search results and personally they are not good. It really seems that Google is more interested in staying in control, then they are in giving their users a good experience. I think they better keep their eye on the ball, as their search engine directory (remember what Google is) is only good as long as users like it and continue to use it. With these types of results, I think most users will start to become disenchanted with Google results bouncing all over the place. Personally I often search for a keyword (say cars), and make a mental note  that the 3rd result was the website I wanted to go back to, but now I can do the same search and that site might not even be on the first page.

It appears that webmasters are beginning to simply write off Yahoo. Recently Yahoo started to scan websites and display the results within the search results:

Yahoo has labeled this “searchscan” and this with the over active crawl of Yahoo’s slerp is beginning to annoy webmasters around the world. On a thread in webmasterworld there are discussions about slowing down Yahoo Slerp and banning it all together.

Personally from an SEO standpoint, I am torn, traffic is traffic and even if Yahoo only gives you 10% of your traffic that is still good quality free traffic. Now the “gray hat” seo part of me, says block Yahoo Slerp, but not because of it’s over active crawl or because of its new site scan, but block it to stop your competitors from seeing what you’re doing with your link campaigns. Most software tools and competitors use Yahoo to check websites back link profiles. Your back links let your competitors have a clear picture as to what links you have, what links may be new and what links may be paid. Blocking Yahoo will eliminate the competition from seeing what links you have and what links may be new.

If you want to block Yahoo Slerp here is where you can do it.

If your heavy into link building in a highly competitive market, blocking Yahoo may be the answer to staying ahead of your competition.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Until now websites created from Flash (Adobe Flash (previously called Shockwave Flash and Macromedia Flash) is a set of multimedia technologies developed and distributed by Adobe Systems and earlier by Macromedia. Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and, more recently, to develop rich internet websites). It was invisible to all search engine spiders. This meant that a beautifully created flash website could not be indexed beyond and meta information or simple text included on the website.

Today Google and Yahoo announced that in partnership with Adobe they have the ability to index flash. This should come as a huge relief to high end web designers and site owners who have spent big bucks on beautiful flash websites. This technology has long been suppressed by the SEO (search engine optimization) community, because of this indexing problem.

According to Google software engineers Ron Adler and Janis Stipins:

Google can now:

Index text content within Flash

1) This Flash text can be used for the snippet that appears beneath your link in Google search results.

2) Flash text will be used to compare with keywords used in Google searches.

3) Index able Flash content includes text within Flash buttons and menus.

Index links with Flash

1) Links within Flash files can be followed by Google’s web crawler.

Google cannot index non-textual Flash content

1) Google can’t index images within Flash files.

2) Google can’t index text that appears in Flash-based images.

3) Google will not generate anchor text for non-text, Flash-based links.

Google is referring to this as the “Flash indexing algorithm” which is long overdue considering that flash has been around since 1996, and 12 years is not really the anticipated call to action that one would expect from 3 multi-billion dollar companies (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft).

The SEO community does not recommend creating websites exclusively created by flash, but using it within your site should be just fine now.

It has been documented that Google, among other search engines, adds value to domains that have static IP addresses. I suppose that Google must view the expenditure on a static IP address as a sign of how serious the webmaster or domain owners’ intentions are moving forward. It would make sense that spam sites would go through a great expense to get all of their autogenerated websites on separate IP address’s. This would also go hand and hand with the information about the length of domain registration and age of domain having significant influence on your search results.

You may have heard of people in the link building world discussing C Class IP adddress. This is the 3 block of numbers in an IP address which is usually the one that remains static when assigning IP address to multiple domains on one server.

Example: An IP consist of 4 parts AAA.BBB.CCC.xxx - the first part is called A-class, the second part B-class and the third part C-class. So any IP under the last part will be in the same C-class. So for example:

111.222.333.1 and 111.222.333.2 are in the same C-class but
111.222.332.1 and 111.222.333.1 are in two different C-classes

Most small hosts manage very few C Class IP addresses. The search engines have discovered in the past link builders whom had multiple sites on the same C class IP linking to one another.  Google has since devalued or removed any value from links from the same C class IP addresses. They have also reduced the ability of multiple sites on one IP to pass link juice to any other website.

Until recently hosts did not care about keeping sites on dedicated C class IP’s. Recently you have seen a rise on SEO (search engine optimization) hosting services. These are people who have figured this C class IP address formula out and are offering the ability to have lots of C class IP addresses.

Last night I was looking to build out some keywords lists, and I remembered about a few cool tools for developing and building out keyword lists.

One is called spyfu.

Spyfu gives you the ability to review your competitors keywords, what they are focusing on and what they are using successfully (this requires a little homework).

Another is called Keyword Spy

Keyword Spy’s services is similar to spyfu, although they offer greater reporting and a little less data than spyfu.

Once you have compiled your keywords, if your looking to go deeper, you can use a keyword combiner like adwords generator

Just a few basic tips for keyword discovery and manipulation.

OK I thought I should circle the wagons on the webmaster tools, and show you something that will compensate for the short comings of all search engines webmaster tools, the software is called SEOAdministrator.

This has some very good tools. Best of all it will easily run ranking reports for your site, stores the reports and shows you updates each and every time you run it. This lets you watch your search engine rankings rise and (hopefully not) fall, it also shows you how many places each way. It works with nearly all major search engines and as long as your searches do not get too extensive, it runs smoothly without the use of proxies etc. It offers the ability to export reports, and an unlimited amount of URL’s and search terms.

The software does have lots of other functions/services like: link analysis, site index tools, link exchange tools, among other things.

I use this exclusively, I have tried most other software packages out there, and this seems to be the most reliable of them all.

Does anyone know if Microsoft’s search is called MSN or Live? I have no idea. They seem to be separate mostly, but there is no MSN webmaster tools, only LIve Webmaster Tools.

Live Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s first shot at giving webmasters some information about their site, and it is weak. It does give you the ability to submit a sitemap, and validate your website (by adding an XL file or meta tag to your site). Once validated, Live does show you little pieces of good information (more than Yahoo). Related to how Live views your website, it will let you type in a search term, which then displays which pages from your site are displayed in Live search.  They have this weird scale 1-5 (little green dots) where it shows you how important your page is for a particular search query, which gives you a clue, but with a rank of 5 (your page being viewed as important to Live) you may only be in the top 25 search results. I am not sure why they can not just tell you exactly where you’re ranked? Anyway, they seem to have gotten married to teasing us, with this 1-5 rank, which is somewhat useless in the big picture, when you can simply search Live and find where your site is ranked anyway (who knows).

Unfortunately Live has maintained this dumb little 1-5 green bar thingy for all of their information. They have a domain rank, they will show you the most important external links on a scale of 1-5, your most important internal links on a scale of 1-5 , how many pages from your site are indexed and when the last time the Live spider indexed your pages.  All great info, except for the 1-5 green bar…kill that someone!

Overall, Live has the right ideas, but they really need to dump this 1-5 grading dot chart and give us the nuts and bolts. Show me exactly where I rank for say my top 100 queries and show me all the links you see both external and internal. If Live makes these changes, they may be onto something.

Do yourself a favor: do not disregard Live/MSN. Yahoo is giving up market share and MSN/LIVE is getting it.

Yahoo has its own webmaster tools, they call it site explorer. In theory it is to be similar to Google’s webmaster tools, although it is a half hearted attempt and really does not offer you much insight into your websites stats within Yahoo.

Yahoo site explorer does offer the opportunity to submit a sitemap to Yahoo, and to review what and how many pages from your site are actually indexed (within the Yahoo search results). It will also display your external and internal links, and this is one spot where Yahoo really shines. Yahoo displays all of your back links (links from external sites). Unlike (Google “traditionally’ only shows a certain percentage of your back links), your Yahoo back links can also be exported to excel so you can thumb through them and sort them efficiently. Lastly Yahoo does provide you the opportunity to remove pages or entire websites from its index which can be handy if Slurp (Yahoo’s search engine spiders name) indexes pages that you did not want indexed.

Yahoo has a signifgant amount of work to do to gets its version of webmaster tools up to snuff: offer the basic search results for your site and web site ranking would be the bare minimum.