Is PageRank Useless in Seach Engine Optimisation? - October 31st, 2006

There has been a lot of bad press surrounding PageRank recently stating that it doesnt count for anything or help sites’ listings in any way. This is a complete turnaround from a few years ago, when many people viewed PageRank as the be all and end all. Nowadays, people spend a lot more attention to the number of backlinks than the PR, but neither of these give the full picture. Not all links are equal, as some give more benefit than others.

PageRank is useful as it gives a “score” of the total benefit of these links, which can be seen at a glance. Of course, this is flawed because it does not take relevancy or anchor text into account. The best way to analyze a site’s inbound link strength is to visit all pages linking to it and look at the anchor text, strength and relevancy of that site. Unfortunately, this is hopelessly time consuming.

Although PageRank does nothing directly, it is a fairly good indicator for a site’s strength. There is a definite correlation between sites’ PageRank and their listings in Google, and it still has its place in search engine optimisation.

Dave Stewart
SEO Programmer

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Search Engine friendly URLs and the consequences for Search Engine Optimisation - October 30th, 2006

Due to the growth of dynamic web sites, many websites are required to pass parameters into one of a small number of files to control the output. Whilst this is a brilliant way to allow even the most novice of computer user the ability to control the content of his/her website, it usually also forces the user to use parameter controlled files to allow this flexibility.

One of Google’s strengths is its ability to provide the content the user requires, and this is based on a number of algorithms, both for on-page crawling and off page crawling. Search engine friendly URLs optimise the page for the on-page crawler. Google provides extra weight to keywords in a URL; For example, if you type the word “chair” into a Google worldwide search, out of the top 10 results, the word chair is included at some point of the URL in 8 of these results. Whilst other search engine optimisation work is just as important as search engine friendly URLs, all the techniques we use here at Just Search come together to give you a better optimised website.

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