Keeping Up with Google's Changes

With Google having such a leading position in the search engine world and so many webmasters looking to Google for traffic, you might guess that there's a lot of discussion about Google in various places around the Web. And you'd be right! My favorite place for Google news and gossip is Webmaster World (http://www.webmasterworld.com). It's not often that the terms civilized and online forums go together, but they do in this case. Discourse on this site is friendly, informative, and generally flame-free. I have learned a lot from this site.

There are also a few weblogs focused on Google and searching in general:

• Google Weblog (http://google.blogspace.com) keeps on top of everything Google, from the newest search syntax to Google's holiday logos (http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html).

• Google Blog (http://www.google.com/googleblog) is the official Google weblog and features announcements, pointers, and behind-the-scenes commentary from the Googleplex.

• John Battelle's Searchblog (http://battellemedia.com) covers search in all forms.

What the Googleheads are Reading

They consider those a worth-it source of information, so why don't we pay them a visit and see what they can offer us :

• Aaron Swartz's Google Weblog
  
• Ask.com Blog
  
• Charlene Li's Blog
  
• Dutch Cowboys (Dutch)
  
• Google Guide
  
• Jeremy Zawodny's Blog
  
• John Battelle's Searchblog
  
• Marketing Pilgrim
  
• MSN Search Weblog
  
• Nathan Weinberg's Inside Google
  
• Philipp Lenssen's Google BlogoscopedOJO!Buscador (Spanish)
  
• Marketing Facts (Dutch)
  
• Robert Scoble's Scobleizer
  
• PassingNotes
  
• Rael Dornfest's Raelity Bytes
  
• Pandia Search World
  
• ResearchBuzz
  
• Resource Shelf
  
• Roodlicht (Dutch)
  
• Search Engine Blog
  
• Search Engine Journal
  
• Search Engine Lowdown
  
• Search Engine Roundtable
  
• Search Engine Watch Blog
  
• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• Slashdot - Google
  
• Slashdot (Japanese)
  
• Traffick
  
• Voelspriet (Dutch)
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• What's On Tonight (Allen Weiner)
• Yahoo Search Blog

I haven't used my Japanese and Dutch in while ;)
But the others are worth taking a look. Some of them might happen to turn you into an addicted return visitor. As they did with me :)

The Mysterious PageRank

You might hear a lot of people talk about Google's PageRank, bragging about attaining the misty heights of rank 7 or 8 or speaking reverently of sites that have achieved 9 or 10. PageRanks range from (sites that have been penalized or not ranked) to 10 (reserved for only the most popular sites, such as Yahoo! and Google itself).

Google has never provided the entire formula for their PageRank. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the formula is changing all the time; as millions of people try myriad methods to increase their page ranking, Google has to take these efforts into account and (sometimes) react against them.

Why is PageRank so important? Because Google uses that as one aspect of determining how a given URL will rank among millions of possible search results. But that's only one aspect. The other aspects are determined via Google's ranking algorithm.

The latest trends in SEO show that the PR is not that important lately .. but we should still keep an eye on it...

Google's Importance to Webmasters

What is Google? .. isn't Google just a simple search engine, a website like any other?

Recently its reach become alooot greater than any other search engine, simple or. Google partners with some of the major players - like AOL for example (there many others but to keep it we will leave you discover those in some of the later posts) They use the Google index results to feed their content hungry customers and visitors. In addition to that there are sooo many websites using the Google API. So when you think about potential visitors from Google search results, your imagination should go way beyond traditional search engine borders.

How Google sees your website has become a really important factor that will determine how well you will rank in the search results and how fast your site will be indexed, everything turns around the "big G" which means that you want to make sure that your site abides by the Google rules or risk not being picked up.

Welcome the Spiders. If you do want generic search traffic you you're going to have to make sure that your site is optimized for Google and ready to be indexed - then - accept the important guests - the spiders. We will discuss those later on.

And if you're concerned that Google should not index some parts of your site, you need to understand the ins and outs of configuring your robots.txt file to reflect your preferences.

To be continued...

BioKey v.1.0 (Keyword suggestions)

This is not a search engine.
BioKey is not a tool for finding resources on the World Wide Web.
BioKey is a tool incorporates Overture's keyword suggestion tool and Google to reveal active keyword phrases that people use to search. Enter a search term, and BioKey will return about a 100 variations of that search term, of which people have used to search the search engines in the *prior 30 days*. This tool is useful for developing lists of keywords for the search engines, and finding new and/or in-demand niches and keyword phrases.

Try BioKey v.1.0 (Keyword suggestions) absolutely free