ATOM or PageRank : Natural Search Blog

Google Takes RSS & Atom Feeds out of Web Search Results

Google just announced this week that they have started reducing RSS & Atom feeds out of their search engine results pages (”SERPs”) - something that makes a lot of sense in terms of improving quality/usability in their results. (They also describe why they aren’t doing that for podcast feeds.)

This might confuse search marketers about the value of providing RSS feeds on one’s site for the purposes of natural search marketing. Here at Netconcepts, we’ve recommended using RSS for retail sites and blogs for quite some time, and we continue to do so. Webmasters often take syndicated feeds in order to provide helpful content and utilities on their sites, and so providing feeds can help you to gain external links pointing back to your site when webmasters display your feed content on their pages.

Google has removed RSS feed content from their regular SERPs, but they haven’t necessarily reduced any of the benefit of the links produced when those feeds are adopted and displayed on other sites. When RSS and Atom feeds are used by developers, they pull in the feed content and then typically redisplay it on their site pages in regular HTML formatting. When those pages link back to you as many feed-displayed pages do, the links transfer PageRank back to the site originating the feeds, and this results in building up ranking values.

So, don’t stop using RSS or Atom feeds!

Popularity: 12% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 12/19/2007 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Blog Optimization, Google, URLs ATOM, Feeds, Google, PageRank, RSS

Google Employees Can’t Find PageRank - Must Search For It

Last night, I was comparing relative popularity of a few keywords in Google Trends, and I noticed that the term, “PageRank”, apparently has the highest number of searches in the US from people in the city of Mountain View, California:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=pagerank&ctab=0&geo=US&date=all

As you may be aware, Google headquarters is located in Mountain View (see map).

So the most likely reason that most USÂ ”PageRank” searches happen in that little town is that Google employees are frequently submitting searches for info about PageRank. They may be searching for what people are saying about PageRank, or they may be searching for new research papers concerning the algorithm. But, they’re definitely searching for it…

For the one place in the world that has the most PageRank of all, you’d think they wouldn’t have to search for it.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/23/2007 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (1) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Google, PageRank Google, Google-Trends, PageRank

Leveraging Wikipedia for SEO: it’s no longer about the link juice

Recently when I blogged about the SEO benefits of contributing to Wikipedia, I alluded to some of the complex strategies and tactics around creating entries, keeping your edits from getting reverted, etc.

One of the benefits that can no longer be gained is link juice. That’s because rel=nofollow has just been instituted across all of Wikipedia and its sister sites (such as Wikinews).

Does that mean you no longer need to concern yourself with Wikipedia? Heck no! It is still a valuable source of traffic and, just as importantly, credibility. To have a Wikipedia entry for your company show up in the top 10 in Google for your company name gives a nice credibility boost. Even better if the coverage on your entry is favorable!

Wikipedia is still key to the discipline of “reputation management.” By understanding the ins and outs of Wikipedia — navigating the landmines of notability criteria, not contributing your company’s entry yourself, disambiguation pages, redirects, User pages, Talk pages, etc. — you can potentially influence what is said about you on Wikipedia. Furthermore, if web pages that are critical of your company occupy spots in the first page of the SERPs, you can push them out and replace them with your Wikipedia entries. Because Wikipedia holds so much authority and TrustRank, it’s easy to get an entry into the top 10 for any keyword.

Back to the nofollowing of external links… I don’t think SEOs will leave Wikipedia any time soon due to this new development. Even though that was Jimbo Wales’ hope.

There is still significant incentive for SEOs to edit (and manipulate) Wikipedia so long as Wikipedia holds the top spot for important keywords such as “marketing” in Google.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 01/23/2007 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Link Building, PageRank Link Building, link-gain, PageRank, reputation-management, TrustRank, Wikipedia

Hey Digg! Fix your domain name for better SEO traffic!

Hey, Digg.com team! Are you aware that your domain names aren’t properly canonized? You may be losing out on good ranking value in Google and Yahoo because of this!

Even if you’re not part of the Digg technical team, this same sort of scenario could be affecting your site’s rankings. This aspect of SEO is pretty simple to address, so don’t ignore it and miss out on PageRank that should be yours. Read on for a simple explanation.

(more…)

Popularity: 11% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 10/04/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (2) | Comments RSS | Filed under: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Optimization, URLs digg, Google, PageRank, SEO, url-canonization, Yahoo

Using Flickr for Search Engine Optimization

I’ve previously blogged about optimization for Image Search. But, images can also be used for optimization for regular web search as well. Where online promotion is concerned, it appears to be an area for advantage which remains largely untapped. Many pros focus most of their optimization efforts towards the more popular web search results, and don’t realize that optimizing for image search can translate to good overall SEO.

Flickr is one of the most popular image sharing sites in the world, with loads of features that also make it qualify as a social networking site. Flickr’s popularity, structure and features also make it an ideal vehicle for search engine optimization. So, how can image search optimization be done through Flickr? Read on, and I’ll outline some key steps to take. (more…)

Popularity: 11% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/24/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (10) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Image Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization flickr, Image-Search-Optimization, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

A window into Google through error messages: PageRank vectors and IndyRank

There’s been plenty of speculation posted to the blogosphere on the recently discovered cryptic Google error message; my favorites being from Wesley Tanaka and from Teh Xiggeh.

What intrigues me most in the Google error message is the references to IndyRank and to PageRank possibly being a vector. In regards to IndyRank, Stuart Brown suspects it means an ‘independent ranking’ — a “human-derived page ranking scoring, independent of the concrete world of linking and keywords”.

In regards to a PageRank vector, Wesley hypothesizes:

“If page rank is actually a vector (multiple numbers) as opposed to a scalar (single number) like everyone assumes (and like is displayed by the toolbar). It would make sense — the page rank for a page could store other aspects of the page, like how likely it is to be spam, in addition to an idea of how linked-to the page is. The page rank you see in the google toolbar would be some scalar function of the page rank vector.”

Of course the Google engineers are probably laughing at all this.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 07/22/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (2) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Google, PageRank Google, IndyRank, PageRank, vectors

Toolbar PageRank Update

Yep, it’s that time again.

I don’t usually care that much, but we had a little snafu with our PageRank readout on the toolbar for our netconcepts.com site due to a misconfiguration on our end (detailed on my post “Toolbar PageRank Update Is Currently Underway)”, and happily that’s now corrected.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 07/14/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Google, PageRank Google, Google-Toolbar, PageRank

Google Sitemaps Reveal Some of the Black Box

I earlier mentioned the recent Sitemaps upgrades which were announced in June, and how I thought these were useful for webmasters. But, the Sitemaps tools may also be useful in other ways beyond the obvious/intended ones.

The information that Google has made available in Sitemaps is providing a cool bit of intel on yet another one of the 200+ parameters or “signals” that they’re using to rank pages for SERPs.

For reference, check out the Page Analysis Statistics that are provided in Sitemaps for my “Acme” products and services experimental site:

Google Sitemaps Page Analysis

It seems unlikely to me that these stats on “Common Words” found “In your site’s content” were generated just for the sake of providing nice tools for us in Sitemaps. No, the more likely scenario would seem to be that Google was already collating the most-common words found on your site for their own uses, and then they later chose to provide some of these stats to us in Sitemaps.

This is significant, because we’ve already known that Google tracks keyword content for each page in order to assess its relevancy for search queries made with that term. But, why would Google be tracking your most-common keywords in a site-wide context?

One good explanation presents itself: Google might be tracking common terms used throughout a site in order to assess if that site should be considered authoritative for particular keywords or thematic categories.

Early on, algorithmic researchers such as Jon Kleinberg worked on methods by which “authoritative” sites and “hubs” could be identified. IBM and others did further research on authority/hub identification, and I heard engineers from Teoma speak on the importance of these approaches a few times at SES conferences when explaining the ExpertRank system their algorithms were based upon.

So, it’s not all that surprising that Google may be trying to use commonly-occuring text to help identify Authoritative sites for various themes. This would be one good automated method for classifying sites for subject matter categories and keywords.

The take-away concept is that Google may be using words found in the visible text throughout your site to assess whether you’re authoritative for particular themes or not.

Popularity: 11% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 07/11/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Google, Tools Algorithms, Authoritative-Hubs, ExpertRank, Google, Hubs, Keyword-Classification, On-Page-Factors, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Sitemaps

The significance of GData

Gdata, short for Google Data APIs, promises to be Google’s new standard protocol for transmitting all sorts of data back and forth to Google and its various services. As Google states on Google Code: “All sorts of services can provide GData feeds, from public services like blog feeds or news syndication feeds to personalized data like email or calendar events or task-list items.” Imagine for instance, starting with a base feed, then adding query parameters like restricting to a particular category and date range and ending up with a customized feed that specifically fits your criteria. Gdata builds on the RSS 2.0 and ATOM 1.0 protocols.

Imagine your desktop machine — armed with your personal profile — communicating with Google (and even with the Web in general) about your email, search history, RSS subscriptions, calendar, bookmarks, blog posts, and the news… and all through the GData protocol. As Reto Meier states, “Google already has a ridiculous amount of my information. Now with an API that promises access to this information to use the way I want to, there’s one less reason to think about storing it anywhere else.” Kinda scary but also exciting at the same time. Google Operating System here we come!

Will we all be speaking GData in years to come? Will the GData protocol become as ubiqitous as the HTTP protocol? Only time will tell, but I certainly think GData is one to watch!

Popularity: 6% [?]

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