If you keep track of your own and competing site’s popularity by looking at the Google Pagerank in the Google Toolbar (the little green bar), then you may notice that many sites’ pageranks are being changed. Googler Matt Cutts has stated that this update should be completely done in a “few days.” He also mentioned that some sites which had been penalized previously were being re-instated with this update. What that means exactly is not clear. You should watch your own sites and the ranking of other sites you use regularly to see if their visual pagerank has changed. The results will be interesting. Note that we are adjusting the rankings of the INDEX sites we list below, as we note changes. Check back in a few days for the complete list. We can already see a trend that many Pagerank 6 sites have de-ranked by one ranking, to a [Click Title to read more...]

July 27, 2008 — 01:54 EST ALERT: Google is currently updating their Toolbar Pageranks. We are editing the Pagerank values we show below as they get changed. Expect that these values may be temporary, and subject to change as the new official Google rankings evolve over the next few days. Check back for latest listings daily. Most experts agree that increasing the number of highly ranked, high quality backlinks pointing to your site is the best way to increase organic traffic from search engines. The more popular sites that link to you (without a “nofollow” tag of course), then the more likely you may be to show up near the top of search result pages for most search engines. Like in high school, being successful online means being “in with the in crowd”. And, the easiest way to do that is simply to go through the tedious process of submission [Click Title to read more...]

Let’s say you’re a web-site designer or web marketing consultant. And let us stipulate that you have a client who wants you to do something that is either illegal or merely unethical — something that either violates State or Federal government laws, the Google Terms-of-Service, or Google’s Webmaster Guidelines or Adsense Program Policies. You complain to your unwise client that this could get both of you in trouble. “Don’t worry,” says the client, “we can draw up a contract that says you’re not responsible for this project. I’ll take all the blame.” So, are you protected? What If Someone Dies? To illustrate this kind of situation, assume that what you’re doing might result in someone dying. Hard to imagine, but grant me that for a moment. Are you protected from the legal, criminal or civil penalties because you had an agreement with your “employer” that spelled out a claim that [Click Title to read more...]

There’s an old maxim in publishing — the first advice a new writer gets from a publisher is “Write what you know!.” That’s good advice, as far as it goes. However, if you want real-world people to ACT on what you write, you should get to know THEM, in addition to writing something that you know about. If you’re writing for an audience of computer geeks, hangout where they do for a while before you write stuff you want them to act on. Find out where your audience gathers for coffee, meetings, seminars, classes or conventions Get into the room with these terrific people — mingle! Smell them, touch them, hear them, laugh and cry with them, get angry with them, learn to feel like they do in your gut Watch what they do, what they read, what they eat, what they drink, what they wear, what they like and [Click Title to read more...]

Over the last 2 or 3 years, there has been some discussion of the length of a URL, as it relates to pagerank or Google PR value. Some of us SEO experts support the longer URLs, while some tend to go for the shorter URLs. At IdeaPro, we believe that in general, longer URLs tend to increase Google pagerank. Here’s why… How you end up with long urls A long URL usually comes about because most automatic Content Management System software platforms such as WordPress or Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla and so on have a setting or plug-in that magically produces really long URLs for each post. Sometimes you have to switch them into a search-engine-friendly mode. Of course, some web-masters actually create the document “name” in HTML manually — wow, image that! CMS “search engine friendly” settings do this by simply taking the TITLE tag of the post of [Click Title to read more...]