I came back last week from a relaxing vacation and found an email in my inbox sporting the following title: “PageRank is Dead.”

Upon reading the title, my mind went blank, closing up in an effort to prevent shock. Was this possible? The Death of PageRank? I tried to remember the predetermined events of the SEO Ragnarok: Facebook devours Odin; Twitter falls to the venom of the colossal snake, Jörmungandr; Google annihilates PageRank; the giant, Surt, sets the SEO world on fire…

I came slightly to my senses, and realized I don’t need to jump to eschatological conclusions. SEO can continue with, or without, PageRank. This was not the fiery end of linkbuilding or SEO.

Certainly it is true that, for many, PageRank acts as the guiding star for the value of any inbound link. The human mind naturally gravitates toward concrete numbers over the more abstract sentiments existing in a good link.

I consigned to fate. I would navigate my linkbuilding solely by the oft-overlooked principles of RELEVANCE, LINK ENVIRONMENT, and ANCHOR TEXT. Come walk with me while I explain…

Relevance is a principle frequently neglected in the frenzied piranha link building-style adopted by some. This explains why, on any given medical professional’s website, you are just as likely to find links to “Mexico Vacations!” as you are to truly helpful medical sites. But linking in relevant ways is better. (1) It strengthens user experience, (2) it looks natural, and (3) it makes you look more relevant to your industry in the eyes of the search engines. Want to know whether it’s worthwhile to try to put a link on a site? Ask yourself if the site is related to your own site, and/or links out to your competitors. And remember that this is not the 7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon. You need to be slapped by Common and Sense if your logic looks anything like this: My site is about doctors, doctors are typically wealthy, wealthy people like to vacation, Mexico is a great place to vacation, so clearly my doctor site is relevant to “Mexico Vacations!”

Link Environment is another principle by which to judge link potential. At this point we’ve determined relevance. But now we must ask where the link will be. While links on a link page are good, a link from a body of text is better. Imagine how someone would feel about your link were it lost in a gorilla-infested jungle of more links. You can only carry so many bananas in your hands, before some gorilla picks you up and carries you off to a more readable site. Imagine now that your link is highlighted amongst a bevy of text, all talking about your topic, and pointing to you as an authority on the subject, or an entertaining take. I guarantee the gorilla population is lower on those pages. But seriously, gorillas aside, your link is better off showing up in the body of a blog post or other content, than it is becoming just another body in a sea of link lists. The search engines think so too.

It is no secret that Anchor Text is the bread and butter of any link building effort. It is the crux, the golden child, the guitar solo. And yet many forget the power of anchor text. For a quick demonstration, type the word “here” into Google. At spot 3 you’ll find Adobe Reader, followed by Apple Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and so on. Nearly all the sites that require you to download Adobe Reader, or a Flash plug-in, or Quicktime to view their contents use the phrase “download here” with “here” almost always being the anchor text for the link. If you want to influence the search engines in what terms you should be showing up for, you better be paying attention to the anchor text of the links pointing to your site. Get too large a ratio of links with the anchor text “website” and you’ll find that your link campaign is a sad sorry affair. Your family will send you emails offering condolences. Your friends will stop returning your calls.

It is almost not worth mentioning to you that the email title “PageRank is Dead” was spurious. Upon opening the email, I learned that PageRank had faked its own death in a publicity stunt.

Further reading revealed that it had, in fact, NOT faked its death, but that we were having a network problem involving a browser plug-in. PageRank is alive and well. And yet… it’s worth keeping the above Triumvirate of principles at the forefront when linkbuilding. They are far more likely to outlive PageRank, an arbitrary numbering system that is bound to be tweaked and changed. These three principles are solid. Allow me to conclude with this quote from a slideshow presentation about the History of SEO given by Greg Boser of 3dogmedia.com and Marshall Simmonds of NYTimes.com:

“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers to access this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequently because it is not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is several months old.”

And just because you asked, were I to speak at PageRank’s funeral, I imagine my remarks would be something like this: “PageRank, we obsessed about ye far too much. So we’ve buried you upside-down in case ye decide to come back.”

Speaking at PageRank's Funeral is a post by SEO expert Jeff Call. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Are Search Engines the Beginning of the End?

When fiction looks to the future, humans always seem to find a way to engineer their own demise. Particularly, pop culture is rife with plotlines centering around a complex system designed to serve our interests with access to unlimited information, deciding to purge, manipulate, subjugate or otherwise destroy humans. (Skynet from the Terminator series, the Matrix from The Matrix, HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, VIKI from I, Robot, the AutoPilot from Wall・E, etc.)

Wait! Complex system? Access to unlimited information? Egads, man! Humanity ends when Google becomes intelligent! Whatever version of the future you look to, we can’t seem to create a Google or a Yahoo that doesn’t try to kill us when it begins to think on its own.

Now, having read a certain CNN article, I learn that Google and Yahoo (and yes, you too, MSN…) are not the sole sources for the future’s worry. There are several more search engines that could pose a threat should they one day reach sentience. With this in mind, I have created a brief guide to some of these lesser-known search engines with all the information you need to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and to see the warning signs of the impending Apocalypse.

The Guide to the Four Search Engines of the Apocalypse

Cuil.com:

Info: I am told that this is actually pronounced “cool”, not “quill” or “kill.” At one point it was self-purported to be “the great Google killer”, but it has since shrunk its claim to “better than AltaVista.”

Strengths: Places a picture with each result, has “suggested terms” tabs for a more defined search, and sometimes gives you subcategories within a bigger category off to the side (ex: when I typed “puppies” into the search box, the box to the right gave me a whole slew of dog breeds placed in subcategories according to type of breed or place of origin. Mind= blown.)

Weaknesses: It’s debatable whether it actually returns more relevant results than Google, or whether anyone will actually use it consistently. The organization of it’s result pages take a little time to get used to.

Danger Rating (1-10): 5. If it comes to an Us vs. The Search Engine revolution, look to Cuil.com to talk big, but only get as far the enslavement of its own employees.

Kosmix.com:

Info: Kosmix.com is not trying to be Google, which is fine. It pulls all search results from mostly media-oriented websites such as Hulu, Youtube, Wikipedia, eHow, EBay, Mahalo, and more.

Strengths: If you don’t want to take the time to search each of these sites for something, you can go to Kosmix and it will arrange them all together.

Weaknesses: But can’t you do this in Google already by clicking on the Video category or the Blog category or the News category when you do a search? It lacks any sort of search sophistication. All it really does is aggregate the searches of all the sites, which explains why it just pulls the first instance of the keyword it can find on any of its listed sites. When I typed in ‘SEO’, the result I got for many of the sites referred to a common Korean family name.
But it’s possible that Kosmix was not targeted towards me. Staring at the main page makes me feel like I’m standing in line at the checkout of a grocery store surrounded by headlines like, “Is Jennifer Aniston dating Brad’s clone?!”

Danger Rating (1-10): 3. Warning signs of an impending attack by this SE will be precluded by mobs of enraged people rioting in the streets after learning that the magazine rack has been inexplicably pulled from their grocery stores.

Hakia.com

Info: Hakia makes three claims in an effort to set itself apart: 1) their search results are “quality”- based not “popularity”-based because relevance is based on the recommendations of librarians. 2) they represent the most recent information available. and 3) the results remain absolutely relevant to the query.

Strengths: Kissing up to librarians is possibly one of the best ways to indoctrinate yourself into the minds of the younger generation, who are still doing supervised reports in the school library (“No, don’t use Google to look up the information, use Hakia. It gives real information.”) Also, the claim that a librarian based search is not based on popularity is indeed a credible one.

Weakness: But is librarian based search up-to-date or relevant to the query?

Danger Rating (1-10): 7. A Hakia-based apocalypse will not be the work of machines, but of librarians. You’ll know it’s coming when any search on Wikipedia returns, “Ask your local librarian.”

WolframAlpha.com

Info: Using the power of math, census information and a variety of other trusted sources of information, Wolfram Alpha delivers statistical information and definitions on a huge variety of topics.

Strengths: I tried a variety of different queries and found information like population, demographics, etc. I learned how popular the name Jeffrey is, compared it to the name Scott (Jeffrey wins!), found the age breakdown and more. Typing in “hot dogs” brought up “frankfurter” and gave me the nutrition facts, with a break down of fats and fatty acids, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.

But there’s no mystery as to where Wolfram Alpha draws its vast table of knowledge. A link on the bottom of each result gives you a long reference list, some with working links. Wolfram Alpha excites the statistician within me I didn’t know existed.

Weaknesses: Wolfram Alpha will probably never replace Google. In fact, most searches allow you to click a ‘search the web’ link on the right which takes you to Google. The syntax for queries is very rudimentary at this point, and straying from it can leave you without answers.

Danger Rating (1-10): 9. Of all the SE’s that could someday hunt us down, Wolfram Alpha has the scariest sounding name. Combine this with its access to a mindboggling amount of information, and I expect that the only way to stop this SE from annihilating us will be to send someone back in time to stop it from launching, generating all sorts of temporal shift headaches, paradoxes, at least 4 movies, and a California governor.

A Final SEO Warning

Will these four replace Google or Yahoo? Probably not, but they do represent a new way to search, and a new way to enslave humanity. As SEOs, we stand in a unique position to not only understand Search Engines, but to protect humanity from the machines, and terrible search results. Use the knowledge wisely.

4 New Search Engines To Keep An Eye On (Or Risk Annihilation) is a post by SEO expert Jeff Call. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Inspired by the popularity of all those “entertaining” and “highly informative” (read also: “turgid” and “loathsome”) quizzes that have spread across Facebook like fire on the savanna, and that tell me so very much about my friends and myself, I have created this quiz that asks, “How SEOed is Your Site?” It has a series of multiple choice questions to help you gauge your degree of SEOedness. When you’ve finished the quiz I hope we can discuss SEO enlightenment, laugh, cry, and remember that time in high school when we borrowed Tyler B’s car to skip school and backed it into another car in the parking lot. Good times.

Question 1. Do you know what your important searched keywords are?

a) Of course! That’s the first place to start!
b) I picked some keywords that I like. Do you know if “hippopotamus milk” is searched on? (8-0
c) Forget keywords, people are looking for ME and my brand.
d) No, but 85% of the time I can spell my name correctly.

Question 2. When you do a search for your site’s keywords in Google or Yahoo, your site shows up:

a) On the first page for all my important keywords.
b) Never where I’d like them to be. :-p
c) Search Engines are so eight months ago! Now I just tweet my peeps for anything I want to know!
d) What’s a Yahoo?

Question 3. Finish the following sentence: Backlinks are ____________.

a) Important to me if they’re relevant. I’ve got like a million pointing to my site from a variety of sources.
b) Great, if I could get any. Do you know where I can buy some? :>*
c) Relics of a bygone era. Followers are the New New Deal!
d) A type of rare sausage made from the hindquarters of the animal.

Question 4. How much content does your site have?

a) I have loads, including plenty of unique written content, a daily blog with useful information, and a smattering of video and and podcasts and more.  “How much content”… HA!
b) I’ve got some stuff written on my pages. But wait! My homepage is this awesome flash animation of some tapirs dancing with leprechauns! ;-D
c) Is this quiz still going? Boooooring! If you can’t say it in less than 140 characters it doesn’t need to be said! I’m outta here!
d) Very content, thank you.

Question 5. How are you using your page titles and meta descriptions?

a) Each is unique and is used to target my keywords and identify my site. My meta description even has a call to action.
b) I’ve got my company name, and all my keywords on every page.  Sometimes I have the keywords twice so people know it’s important.  Is that right? A) always seems to have better answers than me. :>Z
c) …
d) I put it with the… uh… table of contents.

Question 6. Last one: If SEO were a food, it would be:

a) A Christmas pudding. Good at first, but not fully developed. It gets so much more savory as time goes on!
b) A mystery, rolled in an enigma, and chopped into a conundrum sushi roll. Blech!
c) Stale bread, or hardtack.
d) A banana.

*If you said mostly A, you clearly know your stuff. Congratulations! You’re probably an SEO Specialist and your sites are well optimized. You also understand that these questions cover only a fraction of the SEO pie, and that there is so much more to be done.

*If you said mostly B, you are fond of emoticons. And you could probably use some help optimizing your site for search traffic. Luckily, you are AT the website of an SEO company, and we just love to help!

*If you answered mostly C, or didn’t even have the attention span to finish a six question quiz, you need to spend less time “branding” yourself and sharing inane links on Twitter and other social networks, and more time optimizing your site. Search engines are STILL the preferred way to find something— and this is what it is like to shout into an empty room.

*If you said mostly D, you may not know what you’re doing on an SEO site. You may not know how you got here. But hopefully, those three magic letters have sparked your interest, and opened a door to a long series of new wonders. Let us run together through sun-graced search optimization fields, brushing our hands across the heads of keyword wheat, and dip our feet into the cool springs of organic search traffic. Come experience the paradise that SEO can offer you.

Having taken the quiz, are we all feeling nice and close? I hope we’ve discovered something about SEO and ourselves. In the true spirit of Facebook quizzes, share your results and fond memories of SEO at the bottom in the comments, and then pass this along to ALL YOUR FRIENDS!

And Tyler, if you’re reading this, it was Ben’s fault.

The "How SEOed are You?" Quiz is a post by SEO expert Jeff Call. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

People often ask me, “Jeff, how can I become a spammer?”  I don’t know why.  I wish they’d stop.  The following guide is for them (see exhibit A).  The rest of you should consider doing the opposite.

Step 1. Forget website mission, goals, and long term growth.
Embrace deception, egotism, and the soul-less pursuit of any and all internet traffic.  Go for the quick victory.  If you don’t have a website mission, goal or plans for long term growth, this is ok.  These things only breed trust and honest success.  As a spammer, you want only one thing: to ensnare your traffic.  Don’t worry about what THEY want, or what they may be looking for.  Feel free to refer to them as “victims.”

Step 2. When someone says gray-hat, jump right in.
Nothing says “spammer” quite like lurking in the gray regions of questionable SEO tactics.  When things go black, blame Google, and then search for some more quick-and-easy gray-hat stuff to recover.

Step 3. Create many pages with the same content.
This makes your little site look sooooooo big.  And Google LOVES this.  When they find it, they will eat it up, and you will never see your pages show up in the SERPs again.  (But you’re a spammer; this is just a hazard of the job.)

Step 4. Stay away from linking to sites with similar subject matter as your own.
Having links between sites that have content relevant to each other runs the risk of being useful, or generating a wealth of knowledge and community.  Find sites that have nothing to do with you.  Which also leads us to…

Step 5. Give links to and get links from questionable sites.
At least when your friends, family, and customers abandon you for a more trustworthy and relevant side of the internet, you’ll have the icy embrace of your fellow spammers and their auto-script henchmen (or henchwomen), all offering online casinos, fake university degrees, cheap generic pills and oh so much more.

Step 6. Leave the worst comments possible on blogs.
These can range from anything like “nice post” to “asethxaekf;asi”.  Avoid giving substance or thought-provoking comments, spend as little time on the blog as is humanly possible, and never return.  You just want that link back to your site.  Remember that concepts like “substantial” and “thought-provoking” are like a poison that can lead to the twin diseases “interesting” and “worthwhile”.

Step 7. Stuff your content full of those juicy keywords.
If you want to be a spammer, completely ignore Nathan’s earlier post about keyword stuffing.  He’s trying to teach you how to succeed go soft.  Instead, don’t hold back, even when it makes the content unreadable.  It’s a given that if you mention the word “puppies” a million times in your 300 word content, Google will HAVE to assume that your site is more about puppies than anyone else’s.  Better yet, copy those Harry Potter books, placing the word puppies at 3-4 word intervals.  Not only will Google know your site is about puppies, but it will also think you are a best-seller.

Step 8. Create numerous profiles on Social Media sites to up-vote your site content.
Not only will you get to feel the pride of moving to the top of the social network and gain the prestige and admiration of peers who have usernames like jeffxx, xjeffx, jeffthex, jeffxcx, 1jxff1, but think how many people you can disappoint when they mistake your content as “worthwhile” and visit.  Be prepared to have a good defense when allegations appear that your article is the first chapter of “Sorcerer’s Stone” with puppies replacing all the major characters.

Step 9. Buy dofollow Links.
This is also known as “buying page rank” or “throwing rocks at Google’s face”.

Step 10. Remember that hard work is hard.
So go the easy routes, take the shortcuts, and avoid things that can make a great experience for internet users.  After all, you’re just in this for the greens.  Make some quick money and disappear from memory.  When the low-hanging fruit is all picked, gather the sour-smelling stuff on the ground.

—
FINAL NOTE:

Being a spammer is a lot like peddling rotten fruit to an orphanage of the blind.  You have no self-respect, and you smell like what you sell.  If you’re ok with that, then keep it up.  If you’re not ok with being a spammer, you should probably do the opposite of this 10 step guide. Snuggle up to a fire with your computer, and spend some intimate time with the SEO.com blog for legitimate search engine optimization tips.  And if you don’t know where to start, well, we’re more than happy to help.  We’re the ones with the sweet-smelling soaps.

The Waggish 10 Step SEO Guide to Finding the Success and Prestige of a Spammer is a post by SEO expert Jeff Call. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

When I was in middle-school, comic books were AWESOME.  Looking back, I notice now that in nearly every comic book, eventually there was the villain that could take everybody’s powers and use them as his or her own.  The uncanny X-Men battled the aptly-named Mimic; the Avengers and the Fantastic Four both took a shot at the extra-terrestrial, mega-warrior called the Super Skrull; and more currently the TV show Heroes has a creepy fellow who can do more of the same thing.  The list goes on.  Feeling geeked out on super-powered goodness?  This is still an SEO blog.  And you should know that the common ability of these villains apply to SEO.

Think of your strongest competitors on the internet.  Why are they competitors?  Is it because their site has a lot of useful information?  Is the site multilingual?  Do they have links from big news sites like CNN, or from government or university sites?  Is their blog well thought out and and a leading trusted voice in the industry?  Are they taking advantage of new media and social media avenues?  What do they have that gives them an edge?  What do they do that makes them weak?

These are some of the major questions to ask when performing a competitive analysis.  They tell you what makes your competition special and give you information necessary for competitive search engine optimization.  These answers are followed next with the question that touches the heart of competitive analysis: How can I do what they are doing, but better?

Now, I know what you are thinking right now: Sure, there’s money to be made as a super villain, but what about self-respect?  Integrity?

The good news is that you can use your new-found powers garnered from competitive analysis for good.  Competitive analysis isn’t about copying.  Improve upon your competitors’ ideas, avoid their weaknesses, and build their strengths onto your own site’s ideas, structure and philosophy.  This is the best way to stand out as most relevant to your potential visitors.  The problem with the aforementioned villains (insert black-hat SEO) is that they’re frequently using their powers to deceive and control people in ways that shouldn’t be done.  This sort of villainy will always lose out to the quality and relevance of a site properly strengthened with competitive analysis.

Here at SEO.com, competitive analysis is one of the first things we do with a new client.  We look for strengths, weakness and give you suggestions on how to implement these in ways that will increase your level of search engine optimization.  Then we periodically keep an eye on the competition to see how (if) your competitors are innovating in their approach to generating traffic, appealing to search engines, or making conversions.  With greater power and strength than your competitors how can you not succeed?

Re-Enter: The Competitive Analysis! is a post by SEO expert Jeff Call. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.