At SMX Advanced a few weeks ago there was a huge hullabaloo about Matt Cutt’s saying that PageRank Sculpting using nofollow tags is no longer effective and it should no longer be used. I haven’t posted anything about this until now because frankly there were enough people making a stink about this topic. That said, I now am ready to weigh in on the subject mainly because Matt Cutts posted his own take on PageRank Sculpting last week and it gave me some food for thought.

So what is the deal? What did Matt say? Let’s examine the details based on his post:

Matt’s Post: “So what happens when you have a page with ‘ten PageRank points’ and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? … Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.” (Colour formatting added.)

Read more…

Good news fellow WordPress junkies! John Godley at Urban Giraffe has kindly updated HeadSpace 2 so the rel=”follow” attribute is no longer implemented! I don’t know about you but having that made-up attribute on my website as a result of using HeadSpace was not a comfort to me. Anyway, a big thanks goes out to John Godley for being such a great guy and acting on my suggestion to drop the psuedo attribute. Thank you John!

Not sure what I am talking about? What is HeadSpace?

If you are familiar with WordPress but you have not heard of HeadSpace then you are in for a real treat. Read more…

Earlier today Nielsen Online (pdf) released the latest search share rankings. Figures are pretty much what one would expect, Google far in the lead followed by Yahoo and MSN, but this past month Google has taken another small hit.

April and May of 2009 each saw Google lose a bit of ground. Back in March their search share was 64.2%, and in April it was down to 64%. May has seen another drop, bringing them down to 63.2%, a full percentage point in 2 months. In these same two months, Yahoo has increased a total of 1.4% to 17.2. Read more…

Google Webmaster Tools has recently seen a few updates. Posted on the Google Webmaster Central blog yesterday, here is a summary of some of the changes.

The vast majority of users will not be affected by this, but now you can submit up to 2.5 billion URL’s with a single sitemap index using up to 50,000 child Sitemaps. (previously Google only supported 1,000 child Sitemaps.) This is rather interesting considering that back in 2000 Google had only 1 billion pages indexed. As of last year Google has more than 1 trillion URL’s indexed. Read more…

Bing is out of the gates and running. The new search platform from Microsoft was reported to have seen approximately 11.1% search share for its first week out. This compares to the previous week at 9.1%, (according to comScore). Not bad for a brand new engine. Read more…

In my discussion with Rajesh Srivastava today on day 1 of SMX Advanced he mentioned there will be a plugin released (no mention of how soon) for IIS  that will interface directly with Bing’s Webmaster Center. The plugin will allow IIS webmasters to submit sitemaps to Bing from within their systems and utilize other webmaster center tools.

UPDATE: It has been 9 hours since I posted this article at an ungodly hour and apparently the IIS plugin has just been released. It is called the IIS SEO Toolkit and it is now in Beta and was officially announced today. Read more…

I am at SMX Advanced in Seattle this week and I was fortunate to have a one-on-one lunch with Rajesh Srivastava, the Group Program Manager for Portal Search Experience. After complimenting him and his team for finally pulling off what looks like a search engine that can compete I asked a few burning questions.

Why did Kumo (Now Bing) take so long to come out? There had been rumors of a rebranding for a while now. Read more…

If your site utilizes Javascript based navigation, you are in for a treat. Google is now able to crawl links embedded in JavaScript onclick() events. These links will not only be followed by Google but they will also now pass both Page Rank and Anchor Text value!

What does this mean for your search results? Read more…

Bing is online a full 3 days before the scheduled launch date; a surprise leap of faith very uncharacteristic of Microsoft. That said, the search engine is “in Preview” mode at www.Bing.com and Live.com continues towards its inevitable demise on June 3rd when I expect the address will be redirected to Bing.com.

I spent a little time on Bing.com and I challenge you not to be at least a little impressed! Might Microsoft have actually pulled off a good product?

It is late and I haven’t done a lot of searching but so far I am very impressed at how accurate the search engine appears to be. I am especially impressed with the image search options. In particular the ability to show only images with faces – nice touch! They also cleverly made the image results never ending… they just load and load and load on demand as you scroll down the page – no more clicking to additional pages.

Anyway, I hope to have a better review of Bing soon. For now please check it out and let me know what you think. Perhaps Bing will earn Microsoft a more significant percentage of the US search market (Live.com sits at only 10%).

Bing, as announced today, is Microsoft’s latest variation of its search platform. The search engine is supposed to marry a myriad of search verticals to create a one-stop-shop for netizens. For example, according to this official introductory video the search engine will incorporate price comparisons and reviews for everything from flights, to hotels and electronics. It also appears to include a hefty dose of local content for anyone trying to choose a restaurant in their area or needing directions.

Screenshots of the major functions of Bing are available in this extensive virtual presskit Microsoft has kindly made available. Read more…