Does Website Size Affect Ranking? Of course it does!

Google Central has issued an interesting video from Matt Cutts asking whether size of a website, number of pages affects Authority in Google.

Mr Cutts says with a wry smile ( he's not lying - he's just ignorant!) at the end of the video that the answer is no!



But here's why the answer is so obviously yes.

Authority is determined by Google by Pagerank which is basically Kansky's theory of nodal magnitude in action (a wisdom of crowds method of determinining rank).

It's not just about the number of links to a page that determines the authority of a page (and here's the IMPORTANT BIT)... for A KEYWORD....

But the accumulated link score of the pages linking ......for Each Keyword!

So Pagerank means nothing until it is chunked and broken down and applied to each individual set of keywords

Nobody sells a one keyword product!

There are usually hundreds of qualifiers that produce long tails for every product

Every one of these long tailed keywords should have it's own optimized page!

Therefore size DOES matter!

(and there is always the matter of the value of internal links counting as well!)

The more pages optimised for each individual keyword the wider your traffic funnel - The bigger the book the more knowledge and the more authority on the subject is given or attributed to the author - It's the same on the web - simple as that.

Website Size DOES matter - ask any girl!

Now I do have one page websites that top google for some pretty competitive keywords ( I should rephrase that to Keyword) but here is why...

1. The one page websites are as old as google itself
2. The websites are 2 word generic .com domain names with no hyphens
3. Each site (single page) has hundreds or thousands of backlinks to it for the keyword (domain name)
4. The Sites (page) are regularly refreshed with new content in the form of RSS feeds!

Beat The System

SEO - Whose the best? Watch out Europe! the Yanks are Coming!

Who is the best at SEO?

More precisely which country in the world produces the best SEO'rs?

By SEO, I mean quite simply results - top rankings in Google for difficult keywords on a continual ongoing basis!

Why am I asking this?

Well the Google SERPs speak for themselves and when you've been studying them for years, you notice patterns!

One thing that I've always been aware of is the geographical influence of sets of results influencing the SERPS.

Living in the UK I am constantly cross checking results from Google.com, Google.co.uk and thanks to some great American black hat tools, many other Google servers.

During the last six months I noticed a surge, no even a Tsunami! of sets of results that can only be traced back to National intelligence on behalf of the page submitters!

Yep Some Nations are much better at SEO than others!

Maybe we should hold a World Cup! Mondiale SEOle!

Google has noticed too!

And guess what my buddies over at Gooogly house are pissed off!

WW3 a new world internet protocol awaits the perps!

According to Matt C they are sending the Witchfinder General's right hand henchman a certain Mr Brian White over to Europe to 'sought us EUROPEANS out!

"Over there! Over there!"

Hurrah The Yanks are coming and they're going to save us all from SPAM!



Watch the video............ http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/11/21/pubcon-exclusive-interview-with-matt-cutts/

So Why Europe?

Why do all the American SEO Conference interviewers think that the UK is a hot bed of black hatters? (Tee Hee!). Yeah especially when all the black hat techniques have come from the States originally!

No for spam you've only got to look as far as Eastern Europe where some serious attacks have recently originated from, and still to this day do!

Mr White washes Whiter - We should all agree!

Google revises No Follow rules - Oh Yeah!

Here's an interesting post about page rank sculpting or black hole funnelling as we call it.

Google’s Changes to Nofollow Management Undermine PageRank Sculpting
Posted by Rene LeMerle

Google’s revealed that the advanced SEO practice of PageRank sculpting will be far less effective as it’s changed the rules on nofollow.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of PageRank sculpting, here’s a brief explanation.

Let’s assume we have a web page that carries a Google PageRank of 8. (PageRank is Google’s assessment of a pages importance on a scale of 0 – 10).

If this web page links to 4 other pages within the site, it’s believed that it then parses equal amounts of its PageRank on to the destinations pages via the links (i.e. each page receives 2 of its 8 PR points).

PageRank Sculpting involves the use of nofollow tags on links to control where the PageRank value flows within a website. So if two of the links above had nofollow tags added, then the other 2 pages would get 4 of the original pages PR points.

pr-sculpting

So as you can see – webmasters could bolster the PageRank (and hopefully Google Ranking) of certain pages in a website through controlling PR flow.

Well Google’s public SEO voice, Matt Cutts, has revealed that Google’s management of nofollow has changed – potentially rendering the practice of basic PageRank sculpting useless. (NOTE: sculpting can involve more than just using nofollow)

According to Cutts, Google will no longer allow webmasters to build up link juice and funnel it to certain pages. If nofollow is used on links, the other pages wont get a PR boost – instead they’ll just receive the same PR value they would have, if all the links were followed.

So alas – this could be the end of PR sculpting as we know it. Given the announcement was made during a Q&A session at a conference; webmasters will be waiting patiently for an official statement on the policy from Google.

Will this change to nofollow impact your SEO efforts? If you’re currently use PageRank Sculpting - share some other ways you manage the flow of PR on your website…

Hmm

Well if you've been following the systems analysis of order you would know that we dont agree with the way that Google is supposed to parse PR as described within, however keeping an eye on Mr Cutts is worthwhile!

What is useful is this.

In an internet marketing optimized network structure, the links would be single keyword connectors , one to a page named the same. If there are no other links out then all the link juice flows to the desired funnel tip - your money page.

Beat that Cuttsy!


Beat The System

Matt Cutts talks about indexing pages and links

Matt Cutts Googles self appointed mouthpiece talks about the necessity of links in getting new content indexed.



What can you learn from this?

Get as many links as you can from authority sites that are spidered very frequently.
Court sites that Google loves!
Create Buzz around your new page by blogging etc!

TIP - check the google cache page for your website to see when it was last spidered

Matt Cutts - Googles Mouth or Google's Earpiece?

So who the hell is Matt Cutts? I hear the newbies ask.

Well he's the self proclaimed mouthpiece for Google - it appears.

Does he work for Google?
This used to be a question on all the blogs and forums five or so years ago.
By the look of the fact he's posting on the Google YouTube webpage these days it looks like he does, and whoever he works for he's certainly got better at YouTube videos over the years since he first started putting out Google expectations of webmaster behaviour via the site and his weblog, with his pussies on his rather larger lap!

One thing concerns me though looking at the history of his youtube offerings, is the shabby productions.
Maybe that's cool in California or Florida or wherever - still are they really up to the sort of production you'd expect from Google...hmm

Here's a very useful recent example




MATT CUTTS ON MAXIMISING & FUNNELLING DOMAIN NAME PAGE RANK

So what do we know about him.

Years ago we believe he used to post on all the forums as Googleboy and none of the SEO community of the day knew who he was for a short while. He was a bit of a lurker around the Webmaster forums, learning what the drivers of the search engine algos were, that is, the SEO community of the days, were up to.

Listening to, funnily enough 'the buzz' that Google is shouting about as being so important in the current marketing effort.
Once he was outed he started his blog and posting lots of videos and hungry webmasters crawled over his every word.
He then became the self proclaimed spam site killer and webmaster witchfinder general.

These days he's a lot thinner and more open about the way google works. He advises you to sign up to googles webmaster tools and analytics.

Be careful how you use Google Webtools and Analytics - especially is you are practising multilevel Social Media marketing.

Google used to vehemently state that the Adsense / Adwords data was seperate from the SERPS algo data and in no way influenced the SERPS

Who are they trying to kid? you've only got to look at a term such as car insurance and wonder why the sites that dominate page one are where they are? It's because the have the largest ADWORDS spend!!
Apply this to you giving them info about your site.
Well for one thing it tells them that you are engaged in SEO - is that a good thing?

Anyway back to Cutts. He's no great marketing guru but he's a good sounding board as to what Google thinks important and where they are taking measures - which if you are savvy you can exploit.

Is Matt Cutts For real - yeah sort of, you should for instance take a very good look at the way he talks about the LINK element in the above video.

Tip - Many top ranking sites are using a version of this to point search engines to their rss or blog pages as an alternative homepage and effectively getting their tired old website listed as a blog!

But to us he has always been just a ploy to leverage feedback from the real gurus, to make sure that Googles control mechanisms are functioning in the right areas and the cleverer webmasters, checked back.