I already see a case of the latter with some blogs going back to their high PR. This blog for instance was a PR7 before the last PR upheaval and was penalized down to a PR4. I now see that it is a PR7 again. They seem to have removed the 30 odd outgoing links which were on their home page and I am sure this is what got back their PR.

Not that Pagerank is an all important factor that influences rankings, but it is a part of over 100 factors that Google considers in their ranking algorithm - an important part at that. 

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1. Search Engines do NOT like SEO software querying them and consuming their resources without the use of authorised API code and/or individual API keys. 

2. Software cannot match human intelligence. You cannot get that special ‘insight’ or ‘gut feeling’ about a website using software. Sometimes this can be the key to rank a site better. For example, any software does not tell you about the quality of incoming links. Just knowing PR is useless. A simple Yahoo ‘linkdomain’ query will give you much more information about the quality sites linking to you. I have explained this in more detail below.

A few SEO Tools I use on a regular basis:

1. The Yahoo linkdomain query - Go to the Yahoo Site explorer. Type ‘linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com’ to find out the url’s of sites linking to you and the total o. of backlinks as per Yahoo. Yahoo sorts links by their order of importance and weightage. What this can help you do is:

a. Keep a close watch on you top incoming 100 links and make sure these sites continue to link to yours.

b. See which sites are linking to your competitor and approach their webmasters for links.

c. See the quality of incoming links for a site which you wish to buy links on.

d. And better still, see if the url that bought links on this site (the one that you want to buy a link on)  have this site’s link in their top 100 incoming links in Yahoo. This can give you a fair idea of the weightage of this site.

2. The Google backlinks query - For this, simply use your Google toolbar (download it if you have’nt already) and click on the small arrow next to the PageRank button. You will see three options - a. Cached Snapshot of the page , b. Similar Pages , c. Backward Links. Use the third option ‘c’. You will immediately see a list of the links considered worthwhile by Google. If you do not want to download the toolbar, use the ‘link:yourdomain.com’ query in Google. Note: Google will not display all your links, only the ones it considers important.

3.  Google Cache: Using the option ‘a’ above you can see when a site was cached by Google. This is important because unless a site is indexed and cached regularly, your link on it will not be considered as a link by Google. Alternatively type, ‘cache:www.yourdomain.com’ in Google.

For more advanced Google and Yahoo Search Operators, see this excellent post by John Satter - The ultimate guide to advanced searching within Yahoo, Google and MSN.

4. Link popularity tool - Compare the top site in both Google and Yahoo with yours - . It also has an option where you can choose to get the results mailed to you as well.

5. Link quality assessment tool - This tool gives you handy information on a website’s links, pages cached in Google, Yahoo & MSN, pages in Google’s supplemental index, Dmoz listing, Yahoo directory listing, .edu, .gov backlinks, deep link percentage etc.

6.  Backlinks Anchor text tool - This tool is useful to find out how many backlinks a site has with their anchor text in them. The tool also displays the location of these links.

7. Website diagnostic tools - A whole buch of useful tools.

8. More SEO Tools.

9. Over 100 SEO Tools listed here.

What is more important than knowing about the tools, is to know how to use them correctly. With the right use of these tools, you can achieve the results you need for your Search Engine Optimization camapaign.

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Aaron Wall’s SEO Book: This is one of the most comprehensive SEO books with over 300 pages of information. It tends to digress at times and launches into different branches of Internet Marketing, but overall its the best SEO book for beginners.

Free SEO Book by Brad Callen: Another nice book for beginners. Though not as comprehensive as Aaron’s book, this book is a good start for people who know nothing about SEO and wish to start learning. It tends to blatantly promote Brad Callen’s SEOElite software, but hey, it’s free!

SEOFastStart by Dan Thies: An excellent ‘no nonsense’ to the point SEO book for learning Beginner and Intermediate level SEO. You should definitely read this book - it’s free.

Other than the above ebooks if you prefer printed books, there are several options:

Search Engine Optimization by Richard John Jenkins: Includes SEO Training Videos

Search Engine Optimization Bible by Jerri L. Ledford

Get to the Top on Google by David Viney

Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP for developers 

Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET for developers

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

Search Engine Optimization:An Hour a Day

and many others…

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Google seems to have devalued its PR ratings accross the board. PR8 sites are now PR6, PR5 sites have become PR4 or PR3 and so on. Rumors have it that Google is coming out with an alternative ranking algorithm code named ‘Webrank’. Interestingly, the Pagerank technology patent is owned by Stanford University and is licenced to Google for use until 2009.

Is that the reason Google wants to develop it’s own alternative website ranking system and the reason for this PR downgrade? Or is Google penalizing websites for selling links? Only ‘G’ knows

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 1. Social Bookmarking
  www.digg.com
  www.del.icio.us
  www.stumbleupon.com
  www.de.lirio.us
  www.simpy.com
  www.linkroll.com
  www.netvouz.com
  www.blinklist.com
  www.shadows.com
 
 2. Free Web Page Hosting
  www.tripod.com
  www.angelfire.com
  www.geocities.yahoo.com
  www.angelfire.lycos.com
  www.tripod.lycos.com
  www.members.freewebs.com
  www.onesite.com
  www.onesite.com
  www.freewebspace.com
  www.weebly.com/
 
 3. Personal Profile Pages
  www.360.yahoo.com
  www.my.opera.com/community
  www.my.aol.com
  www.homepages.rediff.com
  www.googlepages.com
  www.perfspot.com
  www.imageshack.us
  http://community.webshots.com 
  www.connotea.org/wiki/User
 
 4. Help / Answer Websites
  www.answers.yahoo.com
  www.answers.com
 
 5. Social Networking Websites / Blogs
  www.facebook.com
  www.xanga.com
  www.blogger.com
  www.dandelife.com
  www.blogcode.com
  www.post282.com
  www.talkcity.com
  www.orkut.com
  www.bebo.com
  www.fitresolution.com
  www.clearblogs.com
  www.thoughts.com
  www.blogster.com
  www.typepad.com
 
 6. News sharing / User submitted / Hot stories

  www.netscape.com
  www.reddit.com
  www.techcrunch.com
  www.kuro5hin.org
  www.advogato.org
  www.metafilter.com
  www.kaponya.com
  www.mashable.com
  www.web2.0news.be
 
 7. Video / Media  Sharing
  www.youtube.com
  www.vsocial.com
  www.metacafe.com
  www.vimeo.com
  www.imeem.com
  www.mybloop.com
  www.video.yahoo.com
  www.sharkle.com
  www.eyespot.com
  www.vimeo.com
 
 8. Forums
  www.sitepoint.com
  www.webhostingtalk.com
  www.smallbusinessforums.org
  www.teneric.co.uk/forums
  www.searchguild.com
  www.forums.digitalpoint.com
  www.pchelpforum.com
  www.codingforums.com
  www.teneric.co.uk/forums
  www.businessmix.co.uk
 
 9. Classifieds
  www.classifieds.yahoo.com
  www.classifiedads.com/
  www.craigslist.org
  www.kijiji.com
  www.gumtree.com
  www.inetgiant.com
  www.economist.com/classifieds
  www.recycler.com
  www.loot.com
 
 10. Groups

  http://groups.google.com
  http://groups.yahoo.com
  http://groups.msn.com
  http://groups.myspace.com
 

11. Wikis
  www.littlewiki.com
  www.jot.com
  www.wikia.com
  

 12. Review Sites
  www.reviewcentre.com
  www.xomreviews.com
  www.webhostingjury.com
  www.epinions.com
  www.tenspotting.com
  www.topshareware.com
  www.reviews.harmony-central.com
  www.pricegrabber.com
  www.9rules.com
  www.cnet.com
 13. Opensource Community

(needs citations)
 
 14. Websign Showcase
  www.oswd.org
  www.opendesigns.org
  www.cssbeauty.com
  www.designsnack.com
  www.dark-i.com
  www.freelayouts.com
  www.opensourcetemplates.org
  www.designfloat.com
 
 15. Music Sharing Website
  www.soundpedia.com
  www.projectopus.com
  www.radioblogclub.com
  www.mystrands.com
  www.purevolume.com
  www.ilike.com
  www.jamglue.com
 
 16. Youth / NGO Networks
  www.takingitglobal.com
  www.ynpn.org
 
 17. Clipping

(needs citations)
 
 18. Collaboration

(needs citations)
 
 19. eLearning Website

(needs citations)
 
 20. Personals

   http://personals.aol.com

   http://personals.nwsource.com

 21. Lists
 
  (needs citations)

 22. Profesional Networks
  www.ecademy.com
  www.ryze.com
  www.sermo.com
 
 24. Social Cataloging

(needs citations)
 
 25. Social Citations/Reference
  www.connotea.org

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‘a person who engages in irregular warfare especially as a member of an independent unit carrying out harassment and sabotage‘

Guerilla SEO is a skill whereby SEO’s manipulate the SERPS of websites by using irregular guerilla tactics to boost their site rankings. These are whitehat SEO tactics bordering on the edge of blackhat SEO.

As a professional SEO, I optimize and look at many sites every day, and of late I see a trend of ‘Guerilla SEO’. A lot of people have been manipulating rankings using these seemingly whitehat tactics to get their sites ranked well. 

Some examples of Guerilla Search Engine Optimization would be:

1. Social bookmarking: del.icio.us/digg/stumbleupon etc. By manipulating your sites votes on these services, you can get a tremendous boost in the ‘trustrank’ factor of your site, as incoming links from such site are viewed by the SE’s as a strong vote to your site given by actual users (real people).

2. Free Webpage hosting sites:  Tripod, Angelfire, Freewebs, Geocities et al. Incoming links from these sites also carry a lot of weight in the SE’s as they are high traffic, high PR sites.

3. Personal profiles/ Personal pages: Yahoo 360, AOL homepages etc. Links to your site from these giants carry a lot of weight because of their ‘Authority link’ factor as these are mostly Alexa Top100  sites with high PR, tons of incoming links and high link poularity.

4. Help / Answer sites: Yahoo Answers,  Answers.com etc. - Getting a backlink to your site by helping people (and quoting your site as a helpful resource) is the easiet way to get a Authority site link. For the same reasons above, this link weighs a lot in SE’s.

5. Social Networking sites: Myspace, Xanga, Facebook etc.

6. News sharing / User submitted / Hot stories: Netscape, Fark, Reddit etc.

and many more like Video sharing sites (Youtube), Forums, Classified ad sites (Craigslist), Groups (Yahoo groups, Google groups) etc …

If you use the hubfinder tool (which I had written about last) for your site, you will notice how many of your competitors are using Guerilla SEO tactics. Go ahead - try it out for yourself!

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 This tool can be used to find the common linking factors of the top 10 sites in Google and Yahoo. The Hubfinder gives a powerful insight into the link patterns of your competitors and allows you to copy their linking strategy.  And best of all - it’s free! So enjoy…

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“Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts… and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic”.

Adsense Arbitrage, also known as Clickflipping has been a hot earner for Internet marketers during the last 1 year or so. It involves buying cheap ads and redirecting traffic from these ads to high paying keywords.

For eg - Google Adwords has thousands of low cost keywords which are bought by these clickflippers at less than $.05/click and this cheap traffic is directed to a MFA web page targeted at a high paying keyword (’mortgage’ for eg.) which pays as high as $20/click.  The idea is - even if a small percentage of people click on these high paying ads, the clickflipper turns a handsome profit. 

The question is - was Google aware of this Arbitrage business? Why did Google not put an end to this before? Are they now cleaning up their act fearing a class action suit from Adwords advertisers?

Interestingly, Google settled a ‘Click fraud’ class action suit from Adwords advertisers last year reportedly paying over $90 million towards a settlement. 

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Lets look at the basics for a moment. As part of a continuous job of improving the quality of its search results Cutts has indicated that he is looking for examples of sites that clearly sell links to test against the algo.

I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms.

A lot of unpleasantness could have been saved by simple spending some of googles resources to find some link selling networks (it really does not take very long!) rather than asking webmasters to tell tales …

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Doing a search for “Google”, as a an example in any of the search engines will point us to Google’s home page. If you’ve visited Googles home page, you’ve noticed the severe lack of text, and upon viewing the souce code for the Google home page you can see that there is much more code than text.

Ok, so Google is a monster; we’ll choose another subject. Try searching for “Auto insurance” in Google. It’s a pretty popular search term with almost 44 million results in the SERPS - and the number one page, geico.com, has very little text on it: again there is significantly more coding than content.

I guess to make my point, we can take it straight from the mouth of Vanessa Fox of Google as reported by Web Pro News:

“This point I’ve seen crop up so many times, and each and every time I say - it does not matter! One of my first sites was created in Frontpage with absolutely shocking code and it ranks fine, even for searches with 100 million+ results.

The good word = Google ignores code to text ratio. . . “

So - take is straight from the mouth of Google, and do your own research and see the results. Do a search for a very popular search term in any major search engine, check out the results and view the source code for these top ranking pages. You’ll find that in terms to text to code, it really doesn’t matter in regards to your websites rankings.

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