2006 December

List of PR9 and PR10 sites

12/18/2006 by Eric Enge 11 Comments

Looking for a list of high page rank sites? Here is a site that lists Page Rank 10 and Page Rank 9 sites. The list is not comprehensive, but it represents a great starting place for those of you who want to research the highest page rank sites to get links from.

As always, please keep in mind that relevance is king. But authority matters too, and it’s likely that a link from any site on this list will be seen as quite authoritative.

Also, double check the Page Rank values that you see for yourself. I saw some differences here when I checked a few. Of course, their can be variations depending on which Google server is feeding you data at the moment, and also over time.

Filed Under: Page Rank, SEO

Blog Tag in action

12/16/2006 by Eric Enge 4 Comments

Hoo boy, looks like I have been tagged as well. I know I am going to get a headache finding anyone at all to tag. I will do my best. But first for the 5 things you did not know about me:

1. I am an oenophile (wine lover). I have a first class wine cellar in my basement, and I regularly by bottles of wine that I put in there to store for 5 to 10 years before drinking it. I have been doing this for a while now, so I get to pull bottles out regularly too. Favorite types are Bordeaux, Cabernet, Zinfandel, Rioja, and Ribera del Duero.

2. I really enjoy playing basketball. I play pick up games twice a week with a group of guys from my town that are 15 to 20 years younger than I am. Not a one of them can outrun me in a flat sprint down the court. However, most of them are a bit quicker than I am around the basket. All in all, I still really look forward to it. It’s a good group of guys.

3. Took 8 years to get through college. Actually bombed out of the first college I went to, Tufts University, because I had issues with the conflicts between partying late into the night, and class work. I also discovered that it’s hard to pass courses where you don’t even show up for exams. Went back to school at Northeastern University, and paid for it on my own this time. Graduated Class Marshall with a 3.93 (out of 4.0) GPA. Carried the class flag down the center aisle of the Boston Garden during the graduation ceremony.

4. I started my career as a hardware engineer, designing PC Boards for Loran C Transmitters (the navigation systems everyone used before GPS). Then I became a software engineer. Among other things, I helped install a Loran C navigation system on the Bay of Biscay (off the west coast of France). This involved 14 weeks of working on the French Naval base at Ile Longue, which at the time was where they housed their nuclear weapons. Creepy experience getting on and off the base. Had top secret military clearance from the French military. Unusual for a US citizen. As a side note, it was this trip where I developed a love for wine.

5. In the early 90s, I played a key role in the early days of AOL. My division of Phoenix Technologies has a deal with Quantum Computer Services to promote their America Online product into the PC Manufacturers (we had sales people with those contacts, and they didn’t back then, also, the company renamed itself America Online during the course of the deal). We introduced them into many major OEMs, and helped drive some of their very early subscriber growth (hundreds of thousand of subscribers, which was huge back then).

So my attempts to tag some people: Michael Jensen, author of the blog tag tree, Philipp Lenssen, of Google Blogoscoped, David Temple, of SEM SEO Certification and Training, Vanessa Fox, of Google Webmaster Central, and that’s about all I can think of right now …

Filed Under: Blog, Social Web

Google Image Search Labeller

12/15/2006 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

Vanessa Fox posted yesterday about using images on your site. The post includes a variety of basic tips for getting the best impact on your search results.

The really good stuff though, is a pointer to a cool new feature in Google Webmaster Central. You can read a basic description of the service here. Basically, if you enable enhanced image search in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you will be permitting your images to be labelled using the Google Image Labeler.

This is true social search in action. Once you turn this feature on, anyone can begin to associate labels with your images. So the community at large will begin to label your images, and here’s the kicker, these labels will be used in indexing your images in Google Image Search.

What this means is that your images can begin to show in the image search results for many different types of terms, based on the labels people associate with them. This presents an opportunity for sites with high quality image content to get considerably more traffic than previously possible when the only available tool was the “alt” text for the image.

Filed Under: SEO, Webmaster Tools

5 Principles for SEO Success

12/14/2006 by Eric Enge 4 Comments

There was a great post by Andy Beal about Five Secret Strategies to Add $1M in Revenue to your Interactive Marketing Agency in 2007. Rand later supplements this with some great additional suggestions on how to grow your business.

I really like what these guys have put out there, but I like to break things down a bit differently. So here are my “5 Principles for SEO Success”. These principles apply to any business, but my discussion will expand the notion into the world of SEO.

Become an Expert. This is similar to Rand’s “Start with a Unique Niche”. I am simply adding the caveat that uniqueness is not enough. You also need to show that you are an expert. Perhaps the optimum thing is to “Become an Expert in a Hot, but Under-Served Area”.Becoming an expert is truly at the heart of all good SEO. Without this in your pocket, I don’t think you can get out of the gate at all.
In publishing a web site, being an expert is equally critical. If you don’t build a web site that shows off your company’s expertise in some compelling way, you will never get authoritative links to it. Lack of expertise is what leads people into spammy SEO. When you have a real expertise, and you market it effectively, people will give you links at no charge.
Share your Expertise Freely. Being an expert is a site, but as soon as you share that expertise effectively, you become a magnet, and many doors open for you. People will want to get to close to you to learn what they can from you. Andy’s notion of writing articles to become a thought leader, and speaking at conferences are excellent examples of doing just this.Quick tip to the novice at speaking at conferences. Don’t go there and make your presentation a sales pitch. Share your expertise freely. Educate your audience about some issue that they care about. This results in a lot of good will for your business, and … links.
Be Social. In addition to the basics of sharing your expertise, get out there and meet and learn the players in your space. Make comments in their blogs. Add value to the dialogue on their sites. When appropriate, get into e-mail and phone dialogues with them. Be judicious about this – their time is precious.Go to conferences and introduce yourself. You will be amazed at how one face to face meeting changes the trust level in a relationship. No matter how electronic our world gets, there is something really valuable about seeing someone’s face, sharing a beer, or even having just a quick conversation face to face.
Be Creative. Here is where I bring in Andy’s “Stand Out from the Crowd”. Being creative enables your products and services to stand out. But creativity relates to other aspects of the business too. If your promotional strategy is novel and creative, you are more likely to get noticed.One example of this is the idea of being an early adopter of a new thing out there, and being the first, or one of the first, to apply it to your business. For example, people who were early adopters in using vidcasting as part of their business probably did very well. Not because of the direct promotional benefits, but because early adopters are ferocious linkers.
Be Opportunistic. When opportunity comes knocking, be ready to jump. If your business is small, you have the luxury of being flexible. Make this one of your advantages. This can even take the form of developing a wholly new expertise, simple to leverage a new opportunity.I am not talking about turning your business model upside down here, but the potential of adding a new component to what you are doing. Opportunities take many forms.
A strong influencer in the space may post something about a need they have. If so, serve it. You may find out that a company has a sudden need due to a loss of key people. If so, find out to help them.

There are may such opportunities happening on a regular basis. Just be on the lookout, and scoop them up when they come (yes, a reasonableness check does apply!).

This is really a pretty good blueprint for getting a business out of the gate. Rand and Andy offer their own perspectives and make many other great points, so their posts are worth a read too. Bottom line is that the SEO world continues to abound with opportunities. This is true whether you are building an SEO firm, or publishing a web site. Go get ‘em.

Filed Under: SEO

Google’s Cloaking Policies

12/13/2006 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

Google Blogoscoped has a post today titled Does Google Allow Cloaking When They Like the Site?. There is not really any doubt in my mind that the answer to this question is yes.

I have known for years that CD Universe does cloaking. You can see it quite simply. Search on “metallica CDs” in Google, and click through to the page listed for CD Universe (shows as #3 here in the results I see). Then look at the source for the page, select it all, and copy it into a text editor that provides line numbers. You will see that this file has 294 lines of code in it.

Now go back to your Google search and click on the “cached” link for the same page. View the source, select it all, and copy it into the same text editor. You will see that the page has 34 lines of source in it.

This is cloaking in action. The 34 line version of the page presents the unique text and links of the page very prominently in the file. I suspect that this has worked for them very well, and they have not been banned at any time that I know of.

So to the question as to whether or not this is fair. After all, it’s pretty easy to think of scenarios which represent “good cloaking”. Here are two examples:

Your site uses session IDs to track users, and you simply want to feed the bot the URLs without the session IDs.
Your site uses lots of Flash and/or Javascript, and you want to give the bot something easier to chew on, but continue to present the same actual content.

In both these cases, you are not trying to deceive anyone. You are just trying to address basic problems, in a reasonably simple way.

I have a client who wanted to resolve the session ID problem by cloaking. I had a dialogue with Google engineers about this, and the message back was don’t do it. The tone of the message suggested that the reason for not doing it was because it was not safe to do it.

While I don’t work at Google, and don’t have any particular inside information, I am very confident that this is what’s going on.

Google does do various things to detect cloaking
When they detect cloaking, they will, in fact, make some effort to detect “good” v.s. “bad” cloaking.
However, none of the techniques they use are deterministic, nor do they want to accept the obligation to make them deterministic
Google will not make any formal communication about this, because the suggestion that some cloaking is OK will cause an outcry for a well defined policy, that includes “fairness”
As a result, the policy is “don’t cloak”

Personally, I am OK with all of this. It’s a “cloaker beware” policy. Sure, if your implementation is clean, you may not end up being punished. But our advice remains the same: Don’t cloak. It’s not worth the risk.

Filed Under: Search Engine Algorithms, SEO