Gabriel Harper's Blog

The Apache Web server supports URL rewriting with the mod_rewrite engine. Placing custom rules in an .htaccess file lets you do all sorts of useful things to keep your URLs tidy. One really handy thing you can do for search engines and visitors is redirecting traffic from www to non-www version of your domain (and vice versa).

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I just compared Google referrals to PageRank on 37 different Websites, and here are the results. The numbers are pretty amazing. If PageRank does mean anything, it certainly doesn’t mean good search performance…

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Google Toolbar has finally outgrown it’s usefulness. After years of using the Firefox add-on, I permanently removed it from all my computers.  The PageRank display was my only reason for using the toolbar. Now PageRank isn’t very useful, the toolbar slows down browsing, and I even saved a meager 4.7MB of memory.

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Whatever Google is up to with PageRank lately, it’s quickly losing my interest. PageRank was never meant to be a reliable measure of search engine performance, but it was usually “in the neighborhood”. After the last few PageRank updates, I’ve found myself relying almost completely on other tools due to the extreme gaps I continue to observe.

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Those tycoons over at vBSEO released a free Google Analytics widget for vBulletin users codenamed LiveStats. This free widget displays a JavaScript widget with comprehensive Website statistics from Google Analytics. I don’t plan on publishing all my traffic statistics, but they can be kept private and LiveStats gets definite kudos for using sparklines!

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Google’s Webmaster Guidelines no longer suggests having relevant sites link to yours. They also removed their suggestion of submitting your site to relevant directories. This was brought up in Google Groups recently, and subsequently on the big Webmaster forums Digital-Point and Sitepoint. However based on the logic of these threads, which get pretty heated over Google vs. directories, Google is also suggesting that we don’t have relevant sites link to us!

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Google is against paid links.  They have made this clear by asking Webmasters to report sites that sell links, repeateadly blogging about how paid links are bad, and by evidently selecting sites to torture in their search algorithm for participating in link sales. Obviously a lot of people are upset about this – publishers want to sell advertising on their site as they see fit, and not hire programmers to understand things like “nofollow”. Search engine marketers don’t want to be subjected to Google’s guessing games. Who will be next for Google to torture?

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I feel inspired to post this blog as a reminder to all those Webmasters who think they can get away with neglecting not only useful and relevant content, but allowing obvious spelling and grammatical errors in some very important places.

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Every professional webmaster and site owner needs to maximize traffic to their web site. Affiliate programs, link exchanges, search submission programs, and pay-per-click services offer many ways to promote yourself, but webmasters around the world still pour countless hours into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google is the biggest target and it is no surprise, with over 55 billion searches made on their site in 2003.

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