Due to the rough scale of PageRank, outdated toolbar PageRank scores, hand editing of toolbar PageRank, and a variety of other factors, it is somewhat hard to get confirmation from Google if a link source passes PageRank. The slow way to test is to make 1 link be the only link you point at a site and then let it age for a few months. Then, if a toolbar PageRank score appears it probably passed PageRank. If you are competing on the competitive parts of the web,

Right after I finished writing a post about how being likeable is a great business strategy , I went back to Sphinn and saw it erupted with controversy and negative feedback about SEOmoz's Linkscape. Since then threads have been open, closed, and open. People are worried about everything from the index size to how to remove your site to why you shouldn't label your site with an obvious SEO footprint . So my timing on that last post was a bit off,

Brian Ussery tested how Google is indexing Flash . David Naylor saw Google's bad advice on "no need to rewrite your URLs" in action, when a competing site reverted their URLs to uglier versions and promptly saw their rankings tank . Kentucky seized a bunch of online gambling domains . """"The court recognizes that as to any of the 141 defendants domain names that identify websites as informational only, the seizure order must be rescinded.

If you love reading, JOHO has an interesting article about information ...a bit beyond the scope of SEO, but interesting. :( Noise is the sound of the world refusing abstraction, insisting on differences that are never the same as every other difference. If we are indeed exiting the age of information, perhaps we are entering â€" have entered â€" the age of noise.

4 Reasons You Want to be Liked One thing that has always fascinated me about Rand Fishkin is how likeable he is. Being known and likeable is an effective business strategy for 4 big reasons People prefer to spend money with people they like and trust. We purchase based on emotion and then use logic to justify our emotions. )This gives a likeable person a higher visitor value, and thus ROI.( People give you the benefit of the doubt.

4 Reasons You Want to be Liked One thing that has always fascinated me about Rand Fishkin is how likable he is. Being known and likable is an effective business strategy for 4 big reasons People prefer to spend money with people they like and trust. We purchase based on emotion and then use logic to justify our emotions. )This gives a likable person a higher visitor value, and thus ROI.( People give you the benefit of the doubt.

I am doing a free web seminar with SEMPDX on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 12:00 PM Pacific Time )US & Canada(. You can learn more about it and register for free here . No sales pitches.

Rick Schwartz, one of the leading domainers and creator of the TRAFFIC domain conference, highlighted the value of descriptive domains from a brand perspective : NATURAL BRANDING or BUILD and CREATE BRANDING This alone is worth the price of admission. Brad told us his story of spending millions and millions to advertise and brand with his original 3 word creative domain name. When he switched and used a fraction of those ad dollars to buy a category killer domain name,

Webmaster World's Pubcon in Las Vegas from November 11th through 14th is the only mainstream SEO conference I will be speaking at this year. I have a session on link buying and a session on making money from contextual ads on November 13th. Brett Tabke gave me a 20% off coupon code to share with readers. Registration is currently $899, but if you use the discount code wa-67720 in the next 2 weeks you can save $180 off your conference admission price.

Pricing a Link When trying to understand the value of a link a variety of factors can be considered,

In AdAge Google's CEO Eric Schmidt explains the AdWords quality score and organic ranking algorithms in laymans terms: The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives , Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted. "Brands are the solution,

Google recently expanded their ad offering by inserting AdSense ads on maps , putting AdSense image ads & banners on image search results , opening up AdSense for Games , and monetizing Youtube with affiliate ads for Amazon.com and Apple iTunes. The NYT article on AdSense for Games )linked above( promises a couple more new ad units in the coming weeks,

Years ago )well before I was an SEO, or knew what SEO was( search engine submission was a huge phrase. Only recently has search engine marketing replaced search engine submission in popularity. Search engine submission was big part of the optimization game when search relevancy algorithms were heavily reliant on meta tags and on the page content. As search got polluted with on the page spam you needed to more than submit to compete for coveted valuable phrases,

Interesting story about the success of Guitar Hero, and the music included in Guitar Hero The use of a sound recording in a video game is not subject to any sort of statutory royalty â€" the game maker must receive a license negotiated with the copyright holder of the recording â€" usually the record company. In previous editions of the game, Guitar Hero has paid for music rights. However, now that the game has proved its value in promoting the sale of music,

A member of the SEO Book community wanted to add graphs to the Rank Checker extension . Please give Site Rank Reporter a try, and leave feedback below. I have alerted him to this thread and he is anxious for your feedback. A couple tips... you must save the Rank Checker data to CSV before importing it to the Site Rank Reporter tool. you have to have at least a few days worth of data to see the benefits of the charts.

Since we have a number of popular Firefox extensions, I frequently get asked how to update Firefox extensions. Rather that writing 3 emails a week I figure it was quicker to jot down a quick blog post. To update or uninstall an extension you first have to click into the add-ons panel. When you get inside the extensions area )by following the path highlighted above( you will see an Add-ons window with a Find Updates button at the bottom of it.

A few months back I bought a drawing of Matt Cutts and forgot about it.

I was just finishing up our guide to how to optimize for search suggestion , and noticed something worth discussing. I am not sure if safe harbor covers companies that index content, cache/host content, and suggest searches for downloading pirated works...but if it does, I think the law needs changed. It seems Google could have thought about the torrent related keyword suggestions before launching search suggest as a default.

Whenever I read a story about Google losing it's competitive edge or spreading itself too thin I think that they author just does not get the network effects baked into web distribution when a company is the leader in search and advertising, and how solidly Google competes where it allegedly failed. Sideline projects, like their book scanning project, turn into a treasure for librarians and researchers who guide others to trust Google.

The following is a guest blog post by Jeremy L. Knauff from Wildfire Marketing Group , highlighting many of the recent changes to the field of SEO. Marketing is constantly evolving and no form of marketing has evolved more over the last ten years than search engine optimization. That fact isn't going to change anytime soon. In fact, the entire search engine optimization industry is headed for a major paradigm shift over the next twelve months.