Many times, we that work as SEOs and webmasters forget one very important point. Google is not designed or operated to make us money, get us more clients, or to rank us higher. Google is search. As an end-user, if I am searching for the topic "creative web design" using Google (or any other search engine), then my hope is that the #1 position belongs to the most creative web design information on the web. Since I am a busy person, maybe I don’t have time to click through several pages of websites that used black-hat techniques, link-baiting, paid links, or a very high marketing budget to put them on top. I, as an end-user of Google, want the #1 result to be the absolutely most relevant information available on the internet. Maybe that is why Wikipedia has nearly dominated the first page of the results for many keywords. They often have the most relevant, informative content. As an SEO, web designer, and webmaster, I have to think like an end-user. Back to my keyphrase "creative web design". What do I hope to find? Am I correctly targeting my market with my content. What is my content all about? Am I paying someone money to place my link on their website? If so, would they have placed my link there for free? Does my content merit such a link? Yet, we must provide a value to our clients. They are paying us to position them competitively in the SERPs. How can we best provide that value? In my opinion, it is our duty to instruct the client that they must HAVE the most relevant information for that topic. If they only appear (by artificially manupulating the results) as the most relevant, but that relevance is only smoke and mirrors, then what? Who loses? The end-user and, eventually Google also loses it’s market share. Google does not work for us nor for our clients. They work for the end-user of their services. Plain, simple fact. The sooner we SEOs realize that fact, they better job we perform for our client. I always hear webmasters complaining about the SERPs, being penalized for spamming, etc. They are appalled that Google is doing such a thing to their businesses. Google doesn’t care about your business. Google cares about Google and it’s customers. We that believe that have a reponsibility to work for our clients as well. It’s all about  the content.

Yesterday I decided to try the new Wikia Search Engine and it was a very dissappointing experience. It has no database to speak of. Very flawed and completely irrelevant.

I can’t even give it a complete review here as I was so unpleased with the website.

Jimmy Wales…please go back and do what you do well and leave the search engines to the professionals.

Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales has brought the Wikipedia ethos to his very own internet search engine. But he insists it will be far more trustworthy than search sites offered by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Today, Jimbo’s for-profit Wikia operation takes the wraps off a beta version of Wikia Search, a search engine that allows everyone and their brother to control what turns up when you type in a keyword. Users have the power to "rate" search results, and as time goes on, these ratings will be used to tweak results accordingly.

As The New York Times points out, this means that anyone on earth has the power to rig Wikia Search in much the same way they can rig Wikipedia. But – as usual – Jimbo is adamant that if anyone tries to game the system, his minions will "block them, ban them, delete their stuff."

We have no doubt that Wikia will have a field day blocking, banning, and deleting all sorts of people, places, and things. The question is whether Jimbo’s blinkered followers will crack down on their friends in the same way they crack down on those who don’t know the secret handshake.

After all, this is hardly the case at Wikipedia.

Nonetheless, Jimbo insists that his "democratic" model is somehow a better bet than what goes on over at Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. "I think it is unhealthy for the citizens of the world that so much of our information is controlled by such a small number of players, behind closed doors," he told The New York Times. "We really have no ability to understand and influence that process."

We would argue the opposite: The Wales mentality is far more dangerous simply because Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft don’t go around telling people that everything they do has a "neutral point of view."

Google is also toying with an "editable" search engine. But at least Brin, Page, and company have the good sense to keep it away from the John Q. Public – and to stop short of using edits to influence search results at large.

In any event, Jimbo is intent on making some money from his project, something he’s been unable to do with the Wikipedia, which is run by the officially not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikia also serves up Wikipedia-like info on all sorts of random subjects, and according to The New York Times, the company has already raked in $14m in venture capital – with $10m of that coming from Amazon.

Sometimes I get so busy dealing with my international clients that I forget where I live. Today I was browsing a few of the Filipino sites that I read and came across Marc Macalua’s blog.  For those of you that don’t know Marc, he is a very highly respected SEO and founder of SEO Philippines.

Seems like I’ve missed another opportunity to join one of the local SEO contests, since the contest has already begun and the first checkpoint is right around the corner.

Best of luck to all the contestants! I’ll get in on the next one.

Great job, Marc!

By the way, the mispelling of Philipines (one P) was intentional…experimenting.

I am very proud to announce that my company, DCGWS Internet Solutions, is launching a brand-new service line, E-Commerce Websites & Shopping Carts to it’s already successful services, such as Web Design & Development, Search Engine Optimization, and Web Hosting Solutions.

We are offering complete turn-key solutions, including E-Commerce Hosting, Payment Gateway Integration, Shopping Cart Customizations, and even international Merchant Solutions.

Please feel free to browse around our demo sites, for functionality and look and feel of our solutions.

Coming soon…http://www.easy-shopping-carts.com 

In the latest entry for Google’s Webmasters Central Blog, some important information was divulged to us webmasters and seo that at first glance may seem insignificant. However, for those that follow Google closely, we know that there is something important here:

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

So, what does this mean for us? Well, it means that if you use a “boilerplate” text entry for all the pages in your website. You might get those pages de-listed from the index.

Google likes to say, “We informed  warned webmasters about that here…”

Fix your webpages, or else you might lose important traffic.

It appears that amist all the recent speculation regarding the delay of the quarterly-ish PageRank Toolbar Export; Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team has decided to give us a hint as to when we can expect the toolbar PR value to be made public again. Here is the Q & A, from a member of DigitalPoint forums.

“Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of
the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
_
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.”

As far as the toolbar PageRank, I definitely wouldn’t expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess.

Well, there you have it. Matt Cutts give us some good tips here. You can read the post in it’s entirety over at the DP Forum.

Thanks Matt. 

Well, here it is September 3rd and still no visible changes in the PageRank values in the Google Toolbar. In my honest opinion, that can only mean two things: Either Google has decided to no longer make it’s PageRank values visible, or they are getting ready to roll out some BIG changes in their algorithms. My guess, evidenced by recent fluctuation on the SERPs, is that a major algorithm update has taken place, maybe even new filters on paid links have been applied. Whichever the case may be OR not be. One thing is for certain, the quest for Googledom is still every SEOs ultimate goal. Since PageRank as a number has little or nothing to do with the SERPs, unless you buy or sell links for a living, it doesn’t really matter what your PageRank value is, only that your backlinks are relevant enough to get you on the 1st page of Google.

 Will there be a Google PageRank Update September 2007? Most definitely, will we be able to see those numbers? Uncertain.

Right now, thousands of webmasters are asking this very question. Did the PageRank toolbar export already complete leaving many of us in the dark as to our near-current PR values that we have worked so hard to get. Is Google moving towards the elimination of reporting the PR on their toolbar. Adam Lasnik, a Google employee who works closely with webmasters, dropped in on the Webmaster World forum and was hinting towards this very move by Google. He went so far as to ask members what they would like to see in place of the PR values.

I doubt if Google will do this, but if the data they export is outdated and at times inaccurate, why have it there to begin with. We all know that quality backlinks is the key to ranking well in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) and that will not be changing. The patented PageRank will continue in the algorithms, of course. But maybe this will be one added ingredient to “Google’s secret sauce”.

In a few hours, Google Adwords control panel will be offline for 4 hours for system maintenance. Will they use the extra resources to push the export? We’ll have to wait and see…

Update: Still no changes as of 1:09am Sun Aug. 12th

How important is it to have original and quality content on every page of your website? In my opinion, this is the single most important aspect of Search Engine Optimization and website conversion. Let’s face it, if you own a website, then targeted traffic is what your main goal is, or should be. I am going to address this issue in two sections: Search Engine Optimization and Landing Page Conversion.

Search Engine Optimization

In case you haven’t yet noticed, Google recently removed the Supplemental Results tag from their search results for websites using the site: operator. When this was still being used, it was a useful tool used by many webmasters to identify and fix problems with their website. I’ve seen alot of complaints about this recent move by Google, so maybe they will bring it back. If not, it will be more important than ever to make sure that before you put a webpage online verify that all the text on that page is different from other pages in your website. This does not only apply to your main content area, but also your sidebars and footers. This is especially difficult with Content Management Systems such as WordPress and Joomla. You should have only one HTML navigation system on your webpage or if you like to use two, have one set of links at the top or on one of the columns (i.e. Home, Products, Services, Contact Us) and your less viewed informational links in your footer (i.e. Privacy, TOS, Sitemap). If you use Flash for your navigation, then it is acceptable to also have this in HTML in your footer.

I recently was asked to analyze a website that has original, informative content in his main content area, yet in his left and right columns the same advertising and promotional text was used as “fillers” on every page of his site. As a result, most of those pages have dropped out of Google’s main search index and his only recourse as I see it  is to replace the duplicate content with original, relevant content, rename those pages, do a Redirect 410 to the old pages, and then wait and hope they will be indexed and become ranked.

From the search engine point of view, it is much better to have 5-10 pages of original, relevant content than 200-1000 pages of repeated content. In the case of the latter, the majority of those pages will be removed from the main index and probably will not generate much traffic.

Landing Page Conversion

A visitor to your website does not want to read the same information over and over again. With each click of the mouse, the visitor wants new and unique information about your website: what you sell, where you are located, and why he should choose you over the rest of your competetion. If he sees the same information over and over again with each click of his mouse, you are wasting his time and yours. Chances are the visitor will just move on and find what he is looking for elsewhere. You’ve just lost a lead!

If you write clear, original content on your webpage, optimize it well for the search engine, and people can find you for that information through a search engine, they might just click to other pages of your website. Maybe they will even find their way to your order or contact page. Remember the Kevin Costner movie from several years back. A very true phrase was coined “Built it and they will come.” But, you have to build it right or they may never return.