SEO Blog

Facebook, Now with added Live Search! - October 29th, 2007

I often get comments when I walk into work on a Monday about the contents of my blogs. Normally it`s along the lines of “Another blog about Facebook again Mart, should`ve guessed”.

Well, yeah, it`s not my fault that Facebook have been and still are causing a stir within the Internet community. They`re just big news all the time. There`s always something else to comment on.

Another popular topic is the never ending Google vs Microsoft vs Yahoo debate. Again there`s always something to comment on when it comes to these three battling it out to become the world`s largest provider of everything “Search”.
It is not however often that you get a topic of conversation that involves both topics. This is the case today.

If you haven`t heard MS have gone ahead and bought a percentage stake within the social networking site then where have you been? From a competition point of view it allows them to make sure that the all empowering Google don`t get their hands on it. From a search point of view don`t be surprised to see in the near future a search feature added to Facebook`s never ending list of services. The downside… it`s going to be Microsoft Live Search as the basis for the service.

From MS`s point of view that`s great. Loads more traffic to our search engine, loads more people using it. Fantastic. Even more of a plus they`ll probably be able to get some of the highly valued Paid advertising real estate that comes with the edges around Facebook. All for a cool $240 million, bargain.

The reasoning, well at the moment in order for a user to conduct a web search they have to leave Facebook in order to do so. So why not have them leaving via a Live Search and hope that they leave via the paid ads to recoup the revenue. Good thinking but what I think is going to happen is that users are going to keep leaving to go over to Google and search there. I know that`s exactly what I`m going to do. Why? Because, and as much as I like Bill and his products, they haven`t quite caught up with Google yet have they.

Martin
Natural SEO Project Manager and Network Administrator

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Posted in Search Engine Optimisation|No Comments »

Is Pagerank Dead? - October 28th, 2007

So is pagerank dead? What I basically mean is it’s been a long time since Google did a pagerank export, I think the longest I’ve ever experienced, SEO’s are getting edgy.

Previous Updates

• Feburary, 2007
• September, 2006
• July, 2006
• April, 2006
• February, 2006
• December, 2005
• October, 2005
• July, 2005

For many of the web community pagerank is a mighty tool, regardless of your rankings it can allow people to sell, exchange advertising and links across their sites and has been a growing industry, however we have not had an update since February this year which is 8 months with out a change, has Google decided to stop the export?

Well initial thoughts are “no”, if they did would they not remove the function from their toolbar? and recently we have seen some major sites such as statcounter drop from a mighty pagerank 10 to a 6, however this appears to be a penalisation
although stats counter still appears top 10 for “website counter” so the true purpose of this drop in pagerank is yet to be seen.

Is Google going to be stringent with its rankings, there are numerous methods these days where people can generate thousand if not millions of links and quickly, is Google trying to clamp down?

So what’s your opinion is Google going to kill Pagerank? or at least the visual view to the web community, the impact this will have on a number of businesses would be tremendous and would effect thousands of people, although most SEO’s aren’t really bothered what the pagerank of a site is, it still can have an immense value.

Please put your valuable comments to this post.

Neil
Head of SEO
(Just Search Ltd)

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Posted in Search Engine Optimisation|2 Comments »