Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz takes some time to explain PageRank as it was when it first came about vs how it is today. Admittedly, it's greatly simplified in this video BUT it's probably the most easy-to-understand explanation I've heard to date and covers the changes in the system well. For those of us watch the PageRank on our homepage and internal pages it we've likely witnessed a lot of what he's taking about.

To candy-coat it even more, Rand covered the explanation as part of his Whiteboard Friday series so you don't even have to read. :) Here's the video:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Has Pagerank Changed? (visit for the comments) from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Labels: google, pagerank, rand fishkin, seomoz

In what can only be considered a devastating leak of information from Google HQ in Mountain View, a confirmed but as yet publicly anonymous executive from Google has leaked papers detailing some of the key fundamentals to Google's link value calculation system. The announcement by Google earlier today details some of the contents of this information as they work hard to minimize the effect that this will have on their algorithm as SEO's around the world scramble get their hands on it. The news, first leaked by SEO-guru Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, comes as a shock of sorts and leaves SEO's scratching their heads figuring out what to do. There has been startled reaction from the community but first - let's cover a few of the key points (we'll provide a link to more thorough information below).

The leaked information confirmed and illuminated the following information:

• The PageRank we see in the green bar has no bearing on how a site will rank. This information is generated internally based on user expectations and not as a ranking factor.
• The weighing of factors occurs in the following order: Google's internal PageRank, position on page, number of links on the page, anchor text, relevancy. I found it VERY interesting that trust is not yet a calculation on link worth though this may be an omission in the information provided.
• Reciprocal linking is detectable and while it is not penalized, no value is given for the links. A limitation outlined in this is the Google apparently has little ability to to detect legitimate linking sites that happen to link to each other.
• Paid links are not detectable. There is currently no architecture for the automatic detection of paid links. Google relies on reporting by SEO's and webmasters.
• There's a lot more in there - this is just what I've gleaned at the time of this writing. There's a link below to the documents themselves.
  

I had a chance to have a very brief chat with Matt Cutts (quality control guru from Google) who has told us he will be responding on his blog once more information on the leak becomes available (and I'm sure when he's given the OK by the Gods of Google to talk). His response to this leak was, "... this is obviously an issue we are going to have to deal with quickly. We expect SEO's to take quick advantage of this information and a strategy is being developed to deal with this and make adjustments to the algorithm shortly." You can monitor Matt's comments on his blog and a big thanks to him for taking a moment out of his understandably hectic schedule to answer a couple questions for me.

On the other side of the coin sit the SEO's. While we're all obviously reading all the information we can on the leak - we do so with some concern. In an email from Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz he noted, "You might think this is a great opportunity for SEO's but it's not - in fact this is one of the worst things that could happen. All the information we're all reading will be invalid by the time we could employ the tactics and we're about to head into a period of significant instability in regards to Google's rankings . Not only do we have to fear for the rankings we've worked hard to attain over the years - we also have to deal with rankings that will be in a constant state of flux over the next few months. Clients are NOT going to be happy." Good call Rand and you can monitor his comments on the subject on their blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog.

This is obviously an issue you're going to want to research this issue - there's a lot more about this and links to the documents on the cnet site at http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9907571-36.html. Well, the article is actually about Google's April Fool's Day joke but we think ours was fun too. :) Enjoy the day. ;)

Labels: april fools day, danny sullivan, google, google update, link building, rand fishkin, seomoz

Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz (OMG, that's two post in a row about the guy) had his whiteboard Friday today (as he does every Friday). Whiteboard Friday is an "event" during which Rand uses a whiteboard to illustrate complex SEO theories, technologies, etc. in layman's terms. He does a damn good job at it too.

This weeks whiteboard was about how the engines can "sniff out" the origin of a story through links and rank the first source of a story even if a stronger source posts about it later and even if other sources have better anchor text. It's a great post that right now discusses only the news and blog searches but which Rand asks, "could this be expanded to include regular search?"

Now, in my opinion I don't believe that this type of analysis and ranking really works in the regular search arena. If I write a 500 word summary of a new Google patent and I'm the first to cover it and, after reading my post, Bill Slawski over at SEO By The Sea writes up on the patent (like he wouldn't have found it already) and writes a 10,000 word summary of it's ins-and-outs and an analysis of it's application in the real world and links to the Beanstalk blog post as the first source he found out about the patent on (thanks for the imaginary link Bill ;) which of our two pages should rank when people look up information on that patent? Heck, I love traffic but even I'd have to say that if Google wants to provide good results they're going to display Bill's 10,000 word analysis above my 500 word summary in every search regardless of where it first appeared.

Of course, Rand is covering the technology in simple terms to illustrate an idea and of course the algorithms are more complex than simply a link mapping system to determine first source with the source ranking regardless of content. Just wanted to make sure that was understood before you watched the video however. :)

So without further ado, here's Rand Fishkin explaining how engines recognize first source for blogs and news:

Labels: bill slawski, blog, rand fishkin, seomoz

Every now and then one sees a result in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) that you know isn't going to change. If I enter windows I'm going to get the Microsoft site. If I search again in a year, it'll be the same. In the realm of SEO these exist as well, or at least I thought they did.

For those of you who are SEO's or are learning SEO you've likely heard of Matt Cutts (and if not, you will now and it was worth the trip to this blog if for no other reason). Matt Cutts is easily the most public of Google employees who publishes tip s and information on Google (and other ramblings) on his blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

With the massive number of links (literally in the many hundreds of thousands) to his site he basically owns the phrase "seo blog". I monitor the phrase as it's one of our secondary terms and have basically known that until Matt quit Google, grew to be 100 years old, died, and about 100 more years passed and noone bothered to renew the domain - only then would someone else rank for the phrase. And yet I was wrong.

I happened to be searching for SEO information (it happens) and so I looked up blogs to see if there were any new ones I hadn't been watching. That's when I noticed it, Matt was now in second place. I was shocked but not by who it was. if youw ere to tell me that Matt would lose his #! ranking and made me guess who I would have been right - but I was still very surprised to see him drop at all.

So who toppled the king? None other than Rand Fishkin and the SEOmoz team at http://www.seomoz.org/blog.

Congratulations Rand !!! That's definitely a job well done.

On the plus side for Matt and Google, at least we know you're not cheating. :)

Labels: google, matt cutts, rand fishkin, seomoz

Earlier today I made mention of the fact that on our weekly Webmaster Radio show Jim and I would be interviewing Neil Patel, Presellpageman and Eric Ward. Unfortunately Eric had to cancel at the last minute due to a prior engagement. Fortunately Rebecca Kelly from SEOMoz came to our rescue and more than filled the shoes left empty.

A huge thanks to Rebecca and the SEOMoz team for coming to our rescue on such short notice (5 minutes to be specific). And what's more - she was great and added huge value to a show dedicated to link building.

Rebecca, next SES I owe you a beer (at least). :)

Oh, and to top off our show Presellpageman held a contest for 3 months of hosted content (that's a page dedicated to your content complete with a backlink to your site) on one of his 20+ year old .edu domains. And he did this for 3 lucky winners. Just another reason to listen to The Alternatives on Thursday at 5 EST. ;)

Labels: eric ward, neil patel, presellpageman, rebecca kelly, seomoz, webmaster radio

Well it appears that I'm just not going to be going to any sessions, and that's a good thing. :) Today has been spent networking and interviewing some excellent guests. Let's cover the interviews first:

Rand Fishkin From SEOMoz.com:
Anyone involved in SEO either does or should know the name Rand Fishkin. Whether it's as one of the most notable SEO's in the industry or as the man who ruined it for the rest of us by proposing to his fiance in arguable one of the most romantic manners every (come on Rand ... how can us mere mortals top that?) his name has become synonymous with Internet Marketing.

For those who don't already know, Rand purchased some commercial time on Veronica Mars (his fiance's favorite show. Here it is:

Want to know how she reacted (gee, is there even a doubt whether she said yes? ;)

See? Now how the heck do we compete with THAT??!!!???

Congratulations Rand. :)

Other than a little lecture on toning it down a bit Rand and I discussed a number of SEO issues. We discussed the movement by Google towards personalization, the benefits this has for some searchers and the issues it's causing (such as when you're referring to a resource by it's position in the results ("just enter "blue widgets" into Google and click on the first result" ... "no, not that site" .... "ugh, OK - what do you see in position 4?" ... and so on). it's also an issue for SEO's who send ranking reports for the same reason.

Rand and I also discussed Google's 0.02% claim regarding click fraud (we agree, that's a bit low ;) Rand is also friends with a number of the fine folks from the major engines, I just had to ask him how he can openly state that purchasing links is alright when it is in clear violation on the engine's guidelines. The the client is your client, not the engines. Again, we agree. :)

Of course we covered more. I was supposed to try to keep the interview to 5 to 7 minutes at the request of Webmaster Radio but it likely lasted closer to 15 to 20. Rand, you're a great interview and thank you very much.

I'll post the podcast as soon as it becomes available.

John Marshall From ClickTracks:
After Rand I had another great pleasure in chatting with John Marshall from ClickTracks. Despite being sick he was a trooper, showed up, and was great to chat with.

John and I discussed the future of analytics and some of the enhancements that were likely to come over the next year to ClickTracks and other analytics tools. The main point here was beginning to track individuals differently using scripts so repeat visitors and monitored and (I'l inferring here) patterns among types of users will be tracked.

We also discussed some of the recent enhancements to ClickTracks which I haven't had the chance to install yet. The goal is to make reports easier to read for the layman. From the sounds of it, mission accomplished but most of our clients have no problems reading the current set. :)

We went on to discuss a variety of other issues (sorry WMR team, I just can't keep it to 5 to 7 minutes when I'm interviewing people like this). You'll have to wait for the podcast to hear it all. I'll post a link as soon as it's available.

Jon Kelly From SureHits.com:
Jon and I had some fun chatting about SureHits.com, and insurance and loans focused CPC agency. We discussed Click Fraud (it's a CPC engine after all - I couldn't resist), the processes they have in place for detecting it (I have to admit, they're pretty good) and the hurdles they face as tey try to expand into the UK market with different regulations in their industries.

I'll post a link to the podcast as soon as it becomes available.


The Party:
Last night I didn't get to attend the party, I did however get to ride the bus to-and-fro (I'll post pics as soon as I get them off my camera) complete with the Bruce Clay team, the Google Webmaster Tools presentation team (very nice folks though I couldn't get a card out of them :)

After the party ended (that I only got to ride the bus to) I had the opportunity to hop back on it to head to a night club (Club 320 if you care) and then on for more resulting in a 4:30am bedtime and a sigh of relief in the morning that I switched to water at around 2am and stuck with that decision for the remainder of the night.

A picture is worth a thousand words an these pics might be worth more. The bus was amazing with TV's, laser lights, music, beer of many varieties and great company. I had a great time with the host of the bus Ken Jurina and Epiar. Thanks Ken - it's awesome and I'm glad I had a chance to chat with you and your team through the night.


So, that's "it" thus far aside from business development and networking issues that don't really need to be blogged about. :)

But stay tuned, there are more great interviews and parties to come. We're only half-way through day 2 of 4. ;)

Labels: clicktracks, cpc, epiar, google click fraud, john marshall, jon kelly, paid links, rand fishkin, seomoz, ses ny 2007, statistics stats, surehits