Where did all the Google PR go?

I have noticed an interesting trend over the past couple of weeks, a large amount of quality websites seem to have lost a lot of Google PR. I have seen pr9 and pr6 websites lose 2-3 pr levels for no real apparent reason, what is even more confusing is other sites dont really seem to be gaining much PR which begs the question, where the hell did the PR go?

I suppose it really dosent matter too much however since Google PR has been so abused over the years that its influence has decreased greatly. Now i always reckon its better to have high quality links from relevant and trusted sources rather than high pr sites.

But still it is always nice to see that little green bar grow and the fact that my pr has remained at 4 and yet i have trebled traffic mean that it dosent matter too much in the end, still a pr5 would be nice

Business.com

I have just noticed that business.com have put there prices up by a whopping 33% and they also dont seem to charge less for renewals now either. I got a listing with them in March and the fee previosuley was $199 per year and $149 for renewals, it is now $299 per year! That puts it on par with Yahoo Directory for fees and now really makes it a questionable investment.

The choice really comes down to weather you think a single PR5 link for a quality site is worth more than a dozen lower pr links which you get from Yahoo. For a smaller company however it is fair to say that perhaps neither is the answer, as the fees really do seem to be spiraling out of control.

The Importance of a Domain name

I have been experimenting on using .net domains to have a keyword rich domain and have had some good success with it. My first website was www.fortaugustus.net and after doing no link building apart from submitting to ODP and Wikipedia i am acheiving a front page ranking on Google for both the keywords “Fort Augustus” and “Fort Augustus Accommodation”.

My second site was www.hotelsinayr.net and i have just launched it within the last month, again i am achieving front page rankings on Google for keywords such as “hotels in ayr” and “accommodation in ayr”. The aim with this site is to get a No1 ranking for one of the main keywords without spending any money on advertising or link building.

I am not saying that by simply buying a keyword rich domain you will be on the front page but for non competitve keywords it seems to certainly give you a great advantage over your competitors. For more information on this read the following article http://ezinearticles.com/?Has-the-AdWords-Bubble-Burst?&id=1252549

Content Writing

Well its been a while since i posted but it has just been a crazy busy time as i am admist the process of Link Building for all of my affiliate websites, mostly Rooms in Scotland and Rooms in Edinburgh. The main focus has been on content writing and atricle submissions which i feel are the two most effective ways of obtaining backlinks.

I have writtent several travek related articles and submitted them to five article websites such as Go Articles and Article Factory. The idea is that people will read them and then use them on their website and since i have a link in my author section i would get a link back to my website for every atricle used. Now its not just about links, it also about getting relevant links as since the articles are travel related then it would stand to reason that travel related website would probably use them. This is a fantastic way for getting one way relevant links back to your site.

I have also been doing some content writing, basically increasing the amount of useful information on my websites. After all we all know that Google loves unique and useful content, so the more you have the better quality your site will be. I created some pages about castles (like stirling castle) and walks (speyside way) in scotland and then submitted them to wikipedia as to get a link back from a quality source. Even although these links dont pass link juice(they a nofollow links) they still pass as a quality link so they are still useful.

Well any way its time to get back to work, more articles to write and content to create, it is a busy life!

SEO con artists

You have to love the SEO scammers out there, really they are a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. I had a phone call the other day from a company which was interested in helping one of my websites to the top of google. They could “guarentee” a top 10 placement for 12 months and they had a “special” relationship with Google that allowed them to do this.

Well here is the basic heads up for anybody who is thinking about using a SEO company, if you see the words “guarentee” or “special relationship” anywhere in the company slogan then walk away. It is more than likley going to be a scam.

As for my phone call from this company well i had a little more fun with them, i said i was happy to do it myself but i was then told you cant get top 10 rankings by doing it yourself! Shit! i better just close down my internet business now, are we in the Martix, is anything real? The last time i checked i was top 10 for competitive keywords such as “accommodation in scotland” and “hotels in scotland”.

Well i have to say after i mentioned the words ppc and oragnic i think the guy kinda figured i may know what i am talking about, this was due to the fact that after mentoning those all i heard was “beeep” and the scammer had dissapeared into oblivion.

Well anyway that was my fun for today, just remember if you want high ranking then read up on SEO via books or the internet and if you must use a SEO company make sure they are respectable and reasnable. Just remember if it looks to good to be true then it normally is…

Why Vista really Sucks

Well i thought it was about time for me to get my 10cents worth abour Vista, you can travel from San Francisco to Edinburgh and you will be hard pushed to find anyone with a good opinion of Vista. I have had the misfortune (like many) of getting vista pre-installed on my new laptop.

No dont get me wrong when you initially see Vista and its transparent effects and shiney toolbars it does look pretty cool but thats where the good points end. Soon you begin to realise that this is not a step forward for Microsoft its a step back.

Take for example the boot up time for Windows, everyone who uses a computer hates to wait and the quicker things go the better. You would then have thought that Vista would endevour to be quicker at booting up than XP after all this is an improved upgrade? But far from being quicker it can actually take around 3 minutes to boot up and thats using a 1.5ghz dual core processor and the latest kit! I have seen anything so slow since the days of Windows 3.1!

Then once you have Vista booted up it time to perhaps play a game, maybe Half Life 2. Well when you have 2gb ram and 384mb of graphics you would think this would not be a problem, WRONG! You see all the shinyness and transpartent effects in Vista actually use up a vast amount of system resources so really you can half all your specs straight away because thats what it takes to just run vista. So basically unless you have a really high end graphics card the only games you will be playing are soiltaire or minesweeper!

So next you may think lets surf the internet, i mean thats pretty basic any machine can do that. using the latest IE you surf away and at first it all seems fine until suddenly it locks up and Vista tells you that some various problem has been detected and that it had to close IE. This same problem seems to happen with applications too, then when you are given the box to check online to see what the problem is the answer 99% of the time is “unknowen”.

So in summary, you can play games, software and the internet crash on a daily basis, it runs slower and oh yeah i almost forgot old printers and games dont work either. Bloody brilliant eh?

If it aint broke dont fix it

I run an accommodation based website(s) with my main one being Rooms in Scotand which as the name suggest focuses in Scotland.    For the past month i have been heavily invloved in SEO to improve rankings and i am glad to say my efforts have been rewarding with my main keywords being T20 on google and getting close to the front page.

As a small site i have to pick my battles and the main accommodation provider is VisitScotland, which is massivley out of my league in terms of being competitive.  Not surprisingly they were no1 and no2 for “accommodation in Scotland” which is one of the top keywords.  But imagine my surprise when i check the rankings and see them down to no4 and now only ranking for one page!  It turns out they did a recent site reesign and have removed 70% of the text from their pages and replaced them with shiny images.  The problem being pf course that google dosent read images and thus they have dropped down the rankings.

It is a classic mistake, of basically making changes for changes sake, at the end of the day if you have a usable website that is no1 and no2 in google then leave it alone!  I mean you can continue to get links to your site and promote it but to make drastic changes is just asking for trouble.  But in this case i am not complaining because i moved up to no3 thanks to their mistake! 

Success with Fresh Content

I have been doing an experiment latley in regards to fresh content and the effect this has on SERPS and crawl rate by bothe Google and Yahoo.  Basically i have added a latest news section to my homepage and it gets updated about every 3-4 days with company news.

I will be checking the results of the crawl rate of the google spiders on my site via the webmaster tools on Google and the idea is that by keeping fresh data on the page it should make for more frequent visits from google!

 

How to make Google Love You

Link building as we all know is the key concept in the battle to achieve high search engine rankings in Google, but it is also one of the hardest things to do.  when it comes to building links i often find that its not as much about quantity as it is quality.  At the end of the day getting 100 pr0 links will be alot of work but probably not as effective as 10 pr4 links, the same can apply to relevance.  Its better to get travel links for a hotels website than getting links relating to tanks or gardening.

 So really what you want is relevant links with a high PR and try and get some anchor text (the text that is in the link) with good keywords in it.  Sound simple enough?  Well at the end of the day it is a lot of hard work, but one of the ways to take some of the strain out of the work is to use your competirors.  You see the chance are they have already done this hard work, after all they are ranking at the top of the search engine results!  You can actually get tools that allow you to see what sites are linking to them.  The best one i use is IBP, now it does cost £200 but you dont have to pay that to use the link checker tool.  The demo version allows you to type in a URL and it will display the first 100 sites that link to it, but whats even better is that it displays the anchor text used, PR of the page and exact URL!

 Now once you have this information it is time to visit these sites and get them to link to you aswell, some will have an add url button but for others just use the contact us area.   Now if you do this for all the sites in the top 10 of the search rankings for your chosen keyword then you will be well on your way to acheiving success.

But there are more ways to building links, try starting a blog, search engines love blogs due to the fact that there is constatnly new information to find.  So pick a topic and get writing, another thing to do is type into google your keyword and the word forum.  This should find a forum on the topic area and you can usually put signature links into your posts on forums.  So if you have a good knowledge of your topic area you can share this with people and get links to your website in return.

Ok one last tip for link building, try and get one way links when possible and also vary your link (anchor) text so that search engines dont penalise you for unatural linking.  Also dont just think about your homepage when linking try and get some internal pages linked as it will help those pages rank higher in the search engines.

 Enjoy!

Will Social Bookmarking boost your SERPS?

I am currently doing some link building on all four of my websites, Rooms in Scotland, Rooms in Edinburgh, Rooms in Inverness and Rooms in York.  As many know this is a seemingly endless task and extremely time consuming, i have exploited every relevant link i could find and submitted to countless directories in the attempt to boost my SERPS. 

 So far the results have been mixed with only 1 top 10 ranking achieved along with a few page 2 and 3 rankings for keywords on Google.  My next step has been to see how effective social bookmarking is in regards to effecting SERPs, so i have submitted my sites to no less than 40 social bookmarking sites and i am to gauge both reffrer traffic and any potential SERP boost.  I will give it a month and let you all know what my findings are and if anyone wants a quick and easy way to submit to social bookmarking sites try http://www.socialmarker.com/