Not Displaying Pagerank, Google PR Score Removed?

Posted on August 22, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing | Leave a Comment

Pagerank is a pretty bogus metric for assessing the quality/popularity of a website or webpage.

Even so, I still compulsively check the PR of most sites I visit through the Quirk Search Status Plugin for Firefox. Today, however, I noticed every site/page I visited (other than Google) returned a PR value of “unranked”. When I actually needed to know I could still retrieve the data using SEOForFirefox from SEOBook.

I did a quick blog search for Not Displaying Pagerank and found a few discussions as to whether Google was likely to stop showing pagerank scores sometime soon. Unless it’s just my plugin playing up then it would seem to be the case.

What do you think of Google not showing PR Score? Good thing or bad thing?

UPDATE: Seven or eight hours after posting this I got home and I can see PageRank scores just fine. I’m using the same plugin on my home machine and I don’t understand why this was happening to me at work.

RSS Feeds: Catching Up on Reading After a Holiday

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Information Marketing, Search Engine Marketing | Leave a Comment

I just got back from two weeks holidays and as anyone who has ever taken a temporary break from their job will know, the feeling of coming back refreshed and relaxed can quickly evaporate when faced with the mountains of email that quietly build up. Realising you have about 300 emails you need to sort through, prioritize and action can be quite daunting. Something else to consider is if you, like me, read or track a large number of blogs, taking two weeks out from checking your RSS Feeds can also provide you with another massive list of interesting (though not necessarily productive) articles to peruse.

Information overload combined with the utter irrelevance of many blog posts suggests that it’s not practical to read everything and anything a given blogger writes about, and the cost to productivity of reading, thinking and planning your next move instead of actually making a move can leave you feeling like you’re wasting a bunch of time and leaving yourself mentally and emotionally drained.

So what is one to do? Certainly trimming back the less-than-stellar quality blogs from your RSS reader will free up some of your time. Unless you’re actually getting something out of the research you do, however, you will still feel like you’re wasting time. My goal today (apart from catching up with my pressing workload) is to scan (not read) the 30, 40 or 50 odd articles I just loaded and write here the gist of the article and what I’m going to do with this new information. I’ll also be making brutal decisions on whether or not to remain subscribed to the various blogs on my RSS list. EDIT: That was the intention, I’m not sure I succeeded. Brace yourself for disconnectivity.

Have at you, blogosphere, this is what I got:

Shoemoney

Google Maps User Feedback on Shoemoney

Jeremy is talking about Google allowing users to contribute feedback/reviews relating to businesses listed on Google Maps. I’ve noticed that Google has already been pulling reviews from other websites such as TrueLocal and TotalTravel and I’d be interested to know how they run content partnerships like this. I’ll have to look further into this GMaps functionality and figure out what sort of marketing and traffic implications it may have for my current and future projects. It may be beneficial to submit some reviews of my own but such activity could appear biased and manipulative if I’m not careful.

Other articles from Shoemoney include:

Ok, so without even reading Shoe’s article I’ve gone off on a tangent. My plan for efficiently digesting other blogs is not proving so efficient. Oh well, let’s see if I can’t pull it back on track.

Jeremy says

In my legal experience its always been about “intent”. If someone gets caught ripping off your RSS and you have ZERO instructions on how your rss can and cant be used then you are going to have a hard time going after someone ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU STILL DON’T HAVE ANY INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW YOUR FEED SHOULD BE USED.

If you really have a case its very easy to file a DMCA request to there provider and the content will be removed within a few days (google blogspot and wordpress are very fast in this). Also worst case scenario is that someone ranks over you for your own content in Google and you can send Google a DMCA and they will get nuked out of the search engine…

So there’s something I can action.

Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneurs Journey

Yaro has pumped out some more well written content, this time he’s putting the concept of “Treading Water, Swimming and Drowning” into his own words and relating it to his own experiences. Yaro likes to write long articles and while they’re well structured for scanning I like to take my time with his material so I may defer this one til later on.

Starak is one of the most consistent bloggers I can think of and lately he’s been putting in a great deal of effort creating materials for his Blog Mastermind mentoring program which is a guide to creating a successful blog from scratch. It is aimed fairly and squarely at beginner bloggers but you can be sure that someone with Yaro’s knowledge, experience and dedication to blogging can’t help but bleed universally appreciable quality into his content. To promote his blog mentoring program, Yaro produced a fantastic free report known as the Blog Traffic Blueprint which is obligatory reading for anybody interested in blogs, blogging or even creating and promoting your own information products online.

Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com gives some examples of how wave theory applies to search, publishing, and monetization

Rand from SEOMoz.org has some tips for networking at conferences as well as how to buy links “under the radar”

Copyblogger is piquing my curiosity with typically well written headlines such as Time Is Not on Your Side: Time Management Tips for Writer and The Dangers of Humor

It looks like Tom Thumb from Road Junky spent $180 (and gave away a few books) on a Gonzo Travel Writing Competition and got no less than six fresh 1000-1500 word articles penned by guest writers, including three ‘honourable mentions’ that may or may not have received any form of monetary reimbursement for their efforts.

Sounds like a long tail of content production kinda deal… Imagine the possibilities:

By this logic, could you potentially spend a couple hundred dollars in prize money and have an army of aspiring writers produce enough content to keep your blog updates on drip feed for years?

Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land advises that I must read all these articles on link building. I may or may not do just that.

Rich Schefren Digs Membership Sites: Why the Hell Not?

Posted on July 20, 2007
Filed Under Information Marketing | Leave a Comment

What Does Rich Schefren Want From Joe O’Brien?

Rich Schefren (no aff links in this article) wants me to:

focus on building businesses in a strategic way and not just chase after opportunities.

He told me so in a recent email.

More specifically, Rich Schefren is advocating the Membership Site business model as a strategic platform.

I only read a couple of paragraphs of this particular email before I felt the urge to blog, so here’s some thoughts on the benefits of Membership Sites off the top of my dome:

Benefits of Membership Sites as a Business Model for Marketing Information

I can’t say I disagree with Mr Schefren’s enthusiasm for Membership Sites and it’s definitely something I’ll bear in mind for the future.

Joe O’Brien likes the Membership Site Business Model

All Quiet on the O’Brien Front

Posted on June 23, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

It’s been too long since I blogged here. It’s not like I haven’t been blogging per se, but I have neglected to add anything new to my Joe O’Brien blog for about a month. I’ve got about half a dozen drafts lined up and plenty more material locked up in my numerous notepads so you and I should have some fresh goodness in the not so distant future.

Using SEODigger to Improve Local Search Marketing

Posted on May 24, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing | 1 Comment

A point I forget to include in yesterday’s post on recent improvements and recommendations for improving SEODigger is that it would be totally awesome if you could select local versions of Google to query.

If you don’t know what SEODigger is then please read my SEODigger review of this powerful tool for competitive keyword research (apologies to non-robots) to find out more. I suppose you could also check out the SEODigger website.

Back to my point: I think it would be great if SEODigger were expanded to index results from local search engines such as Google.com.au (Australia) and Google.co.uk (United Kingdom). It’s terrific to see what keywords sites rank for on Google.com but since I’m mainly targeting local Aussie search with my Australian Tourism & Travel Blog I believe it would be more beneficial to see where sites rank in the domestic search engine.

I imagine the computational resources required to expand SEODigger might be prohibitive but perhaps it will be a feature to look out for in the future.

Wordtracker

SEODigger Improvements and Recommendations

Posted on May 23, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing | 2 Comments

Just a quick note to say that I’m still more than a little excited about SEODigger and I’m noticing little improvements to SEODigger almost everyday.

Since I wrote about SEODigger being a powerful keyword research and competitive SEO tool the other day I’ve noticed the following additional features which really improve the functionlity and cut back on the time it takes to do some serious competitive keyword research.

Improvements to SEODigger Thus Far

SEODigger Recommendations

The only things I could recommend to improve SEODigger at this stage would be;

  1. Increase (or remove) the limit on the amount of keywords that can be exported; and,
  2. Tweak the sort function to order all results rather than just those on the page being viewed.
  3. Allow users to select how many rows to display per page (ie. 50, 100, 500 etc).

I’m sure there are other things that could be done to make SEODigger even more awesome and from the looks of it the developers are responding quickly to the recommendations of users.

If you have any other recommendations for improving SEODigger then please leave a comment below. Cheers!

Wordtracker

SEODigger: A Keyword Research Tool to Bury Competitors With

Posted on May 21, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing | 5 Comments

SEODigger is a brilliant new SEO Keyword Selection and Keyword Competition tool that shaves literally hours off the time it takes to perform extensive keyword research for SEO/SEM uses. Not only is it incredibly powerful, it’s free!

SEODigger has a clean, simple interface and provides an incredible amount of keyword data with minimal effort on your behalf. Simply enter the URI of a domain or link into the query field and SEO Digger will report all individual keyword phrase for which the address has a top 20 Google ranking.

SEODigger Screenshot

More specifically, SEODigger returns the following data;

  1. ID - Handy for ordering results in a spreadsheet,
  2. Date - Indicates the date this Google query was last checked by SEODigger,
  3. Keyword - The Keyword or Keyword Phrase the address ranks for,
  4. Position - The ranking in Google.com SERPs the address has for the Keyword,
  5. Wordtracker - The amount of times the Keyword has appeared in the Wordtracker database over the last 90 days, and
  6. Overture - Traffic estimate for the previous month according to Overture.

The automation of the steps required to manually collect this data will save you plenty of time. In terms of competitive research, SEODigger exponentially widens the potential scope of research targets you can investigate.

See the SEODigger Results For Yourself

SEODigger Report

Try this right now: Perform a Google search for the keyword phrase of most interest to you at this moment in time, grab the address of the no.1 result and paste that into the query box at SEODigger.com. You are now privvy to the SEO keyword research strategy of the Top Dog for that particular niche! You can see within seconds a neat list of all the keywords for which this domain ranks within the top 20 of SERPs. Very nice.

In some industries the dominant players will rank for tens of thousands of individually targeted keyword phrases (and more than a few not-so-targeted terms). SEODigger hands your competitor’s keyword strategy to you on a platter, with a sidedish of statistics relating to the search volumes for each term. I’m sure that’s enough to get the SEO’s and Domainers salivating and I can testify that SEODigger has reignited my interest in the aforementioned industries.

For example, say I have an interest in Australian Tourism, I would search out the flesh eating, amorphous blob of that particular niche, in this case TotalTravel, and put them under the SEODigger microscope. I’ve spent a good few hours harvesting their keywords and I’m still only a third of the way through the gargantuan list of 67029 unique keyword phrases they rank within the top 20 for.

So far, I’ve counted the following results for TotalTravel;

SEO Digger Keywords

Considering a lot of the other sites I’ve been checking out barely rank in the top 20 for a few hundred terms (let alone no.1), you can see that it pays to go direct to the source when it comes to keyword research. SEODigger just became your new best friend if you actively compete online or have been trying to break into marketing on the Internet.

It can also be a bit of a giggle to find sites ranking for wholly inappropriate terms. For example, the website of Wicked Campers (a camper van hire company in Australia, New Zealand and the UK) ranks for such terms as wicked bikini australia, free video of naked people and even dildo story!

SEODigger Restrictions

The SEODigger keyword research tool is free to use and register for. Use is restricted as outlined on the SEODigger website

Anonymous visitors limited to hourly 5 links searches, registered users has unlimited links and limited to hourly 10 domains searches!

I’m pretty sure the creators of SEODigger are from Russia so for full effect you might like to read that aloud with a thick Russian accent.

SEODigger could be improved by allowing users to export results to .csv for easy manipulation with spreadsheets. At present, I’ve found the most efficient method of collection to be cut and paste the results to a text editor and then into a spreadsheet application. SEODigger reports just 50 keyword phrases per page so it can still be time consuming to collect information. It still kicks the crap out of manually collecting each unit of data, of course!

***EDIT*** Ask and ye shall receive, SEODigger now supports exporting reports to .csv BUT the exported results are limited to 5000 keyword phrases.

I’m sure it won’t be too long before somebody develops a way to automate those extra steps - SEODigger Elite, anyone?

Wordtracker

A Human Friendly Guide to Search Engine Friendly Titles

Posted on May 9, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing | 1 Comment

I was checking out the websites of some businesses within my industry and was not particularly shocked to see a widespread lack of search engine friendliness.

All of these factors will limit Google’s ability (or willingness) to crawl the pages on your site and classify your content within their index. There’s one element in particular I found that needs attention paid to it.

You don’t have to look far to see if your site is missing a vital ingredient.

Take a look at the Title of your homepage…

Now take a look at the Title of some of your other pages… Notice anything different? If you answered “no” to this question then you really need to keep reading!

I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a human friendly analogy for search engine friendly title tags.

Let’s say you’re the manager of a football “team” (website) playing in the “Widget League” (keyword niche) and you have eleven “players” (pages) on your “team”.

For whatever reason, a customer is looking for a Goal Keeper in the Widget League. They type “Widget Goal Keeper” or “Goal Keeper Widget” into Google. Google will then look through it’s index and identify all the teams playing in the Widget League with a Goal Keeper in their ranks. Google will make a decision (based on a range of factors) which player it thinks is the most relevant to the query and will serve them up as the first result. Bear in mind that there will usually be other teams in the same league competing with you and they will probably have a Goal Keeper. You want your Goal Keeper to be found before any other team’s Goal Keeper.

When you use the same keywords in the title tag on every page on your site you make it difficult for Google and the other search engines to decide which page is most relevant for those keywords. Each page on your site is effectively competing with every other page on your site.

Now, imagine playing a game of football (soccer) with eleven Goal Keepers on your team. You’d get your butt kicked!!

There’s at least two things wrong with fielding a team full of Goal Keepers:

  1. Google has to make up it’s own mind as to which player is your No.1 Goal Keeper, and;
  2. You’ve got no Defenders, Attackers or Midfielders… what happens when a customer wants something other than a Goal Keeper? Google will skip right past you and throw the ball to a competitor.

Please enjoy my visual representation of poorly optimised title tags;

Poorly Optimised Title Tags

Poor Title Tag Optimisation

No professional football team is going to field eleven Goal Keepers at the same time. You’ll find they know better than this and will field a well balanced team composed of specialist players who know their position on the field better than any of their team mates and competitors.

Now take a look at my visual interpretation of good seo title tag optimisation;

Good SEO Title Tag Optimisation

Good Title Optimisation

Now Google knows who your dedicated Goal Keeper is. This is no guarantee that you’ll rank first for “Widget Goal Keeper” because there might be teams out there with a bigger salary cap or a better coach. Google also knows you’ve got a Left Centre Forward, a Right Fullback, a Left Wing… you get the idea.

Read this article at SEOMoz for a less confusing discussion of this concept. You could also google for seomoz keyword cannibalization and it would be first result but at the time of writing you won’t find it if you mispell that query and type seomoz keyword cannibilization instead.

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