Since the majority of people have access to information at their fingertips, the need for real-time has become increasingly popular. As a result, real-time search engines are popping up everywhere to try to fulfill this need.

WebProNews spoke with Jack Moffitt, the CTO for Collecta, about the challenges these real-time engines face. The main idea behind real-time search engines is getting data as soon as it is published. Moffitt says this is challenge for three reasons.

First of all, it’s a challenge because the real-time engines have to convince publishers to send them their data. Secondly, they have to make sure that they get the data quickly. In other words, real-time search engines need publishers to push content to them instead of pulling it themselves.

The third reason it is a challenge is due to user privacy issues. Facebook data, for instance, is private, which means Collecta and other real-time engines cannot use it. In addition, there is the issue of users changing their minds about their data. Sometimes users go back and delete their data or decide to make it private. This creates a challenge for real-time search engines since technologies that distribute these types of action do not exist.

Despite these challenges, real-time search engines are growing in value and will only improve with time with the introduction of new tools and developments.

The term “marketing” gets used a lot and, sometimes, it’s used rather loosely in search and social media circles.

“Not all, but a lot of the search industry tends to be kind of search geeks who are trying to figure out what marketing is,” says Bill Leake of Apogee Results, formerly Apogee Search.

To make a long-term difference in customers, he believes effective marketing is key. Factors such as determining what the customer wants to do, how you can make it happen, and how you can transfer business objectives into strategies that can be implemented, are all instrumental aspects of marketing. He goes on to say that search is just one area of marketing that is important, but it works best when used with the other aspects.

Some people focus heavily on search, since it is easily measured. Other challenges of marketing could result from all the departments in companies and, particularly, within marketing itself. Due to the lack of communication these departments create, many opportunities are missed.

As online marketing increases in awareness, there is also the danger of neglecting offline channels. Online marketing is very valuable for businesses involved largely in the consumer space and B2B. On the other hand, online isn’t as valuable when reaching enterprise level companies and government agencies. Essentially, Leake says businesses need to market wherever their customers are, whether it be online, offline, or both.

He also discusses the recent re-brand his company made and the reason for it. As noted earlier, Apogee Results was formerly known as Apogee Search. Leake explains that the company began doing a lot of social media and didn’t want consumers to think they were limited to search. After tossing around many ideas, the company decided on Apogee Results to let others know that it could return measurable results no matter what it was marketing.

As social media and mobile have exploded, real-time Web content has also experienced an explosion. Content ranging from current events to personal information that is put on the social Web is being aggregated in real-time. Although this content is growing in value, Erik Lumer of Cascaad tells WebProNews that technology is still behind in its ability to process all this information and eliminate the noise.

Up to this point, real-time has primarily been focused around search, but Lumer believes there is a lot more to it. As he explains, search doesn’t fit with real-time since users cannot search for things they don’t know exist. For this reason, he calls real-time a “push” medium and not a “pull” medium.

“The issue is discovery and with discovery comes relevance,” says Lumer.

Over the past year, the ability to measure relevance has improved as a result of two reasons. The first is due to the knowledge and algorithms that are currently building around relevance. The second is due to the ability to better understand what real-time messages are about.

Once these factors have been determined, personal interest is also easier to determine. In addition, it enables technologists to build better filtering services and measures of relevance.

Cascaad is one technology company that is taking on this challenge. It helps users discover and filter relevant conversations in the real-time Web. Although it began as an iPhone app, it is also available as a Web service. To learn more about the service, visit their site.

According to Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, one of the greatest challenges with local search is the data. The reason for this issue is due to the fact that there are many errors and inconsistencies. For example, people fail to update their data after mergers, acquisitions, change of brand name, and more, which results in duplicate and bad data.

Fortunately, Enge shares tips for cleaning up the data. First of all, he suggests going to the search engines. Companies should get listed with the engines and go through a validation process. Once users are validated, the engines are more confident that they have the right data.

Secondly, he suggests going to major data aggregators such as InfoUSA, Acxiom, and Localeze. These aggregators provide data to many sites, which the search engines crawl. As a result, it is very important that they have correct and updated data.

Lastly, Enge advises users to go to major portals such as SuperPages, Yelp, YellowPages. Once your business is correctly listed in all these places, your data problem will likely be solved.

Incidentally, Eric Enge co-authored a book entitled, The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization. He says he delves deeply into topics surrounding local search in the book. For more information on the book, visit here.

When people talk about the future of search, they often include factors such as mobile, social, real-time, and other buzz-type words. But it is not very often that they offer an explanation as to how these elements will impact search moving forward. However, in this interview with WebProNews, search veteran Bruce Clay tells that side of the story.

In the early days, Clay says SEO was easy. He goes on to say that it was somewhat defined even 5 years ago, but social, mobile, and local are not defined at all. Now, SEO is more difficult and targeted and will get even harder over time. He calls the top 3 search results the new first page.

“You can’t be good at SEO, you have to be great,” says Clay.

In the next 18 months, he believes the hottest topics in SEO circles will be local, social media, conversions, and somewhat surprisingly, only some discussion about mobile. The reason for this lack of mobile discussion is because people do not like the mobile browser.

Clay thinks the mobile device will become an operating system with the ability to connect apps directly to the Web, which would eliminate the need for a browser. Although he believes a “find” app will be dominant over a search app, he doesn’t believe that mobile will replace search.

In regards to Google’s recent MayDay update, Clay says he saw nothing but good results for sites that optimized for the long tail. While sites that had casual long tail results lost some traffic, he pointed out that it didn’t impact their conversions.

Google Caffeine is another update that has been receiving a lot of attention of late and Clay had a lot to share about it as well. Last year, Google said that it was rolling Caffeine out to one data center and would slowly roll it out to the others. After having a conversation with Google’s Matt Cutts, Clay believes Caffeine is completely rolled out now but just not in 100 percent of the queries.

He goes on to say that advantages of Caffeine are the near real-time page index updates and increased spam filters. In addition, he says there are several behind-the-scenes factors that make it even more interesting. Although Google has not officially announced it, users can now buy Unicode characters in urls and the search engine supports it.

He also brings up a point about how Google recently said that it has 200 variables in the algorithm. As a result, search results were slower and behavioral search was penalized. Moving forward, Clay believes that multiple disjointed queries will determine search results but says it can’t be done without a faster index.

One of the big details that Google has emphasized about Caffeine is its faster index. According to Clay, if behavioral search works, PPC ads will be better and more targeted, which means that ROI will increase. As the ROI increases, the bid will also increase, which would ultimately generate more revenue for Google. All that said, the searchers would win as well since they would be getting better results.

Clay has given us a lot to think about. How do you feel about his projections?

A couple of weeks ago I posted a video post on family blogging balance (see the full sized video here). While my son stole the show in the video a little one of the main questions I was asked after posting the video was ‘what camera did you shoot it with?’

This prompted me to shoot this video – one that answer the question. The camera I’m now using (and I switch to it halfway through the video) is the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1. It is a still camera but the video it shoots is lovely.

The main thing people seemed to like about my original video was the depth of field (or the out of focus background) – something that is made possible with the GF1’s 20mm lens large aperture (f1.7). It also is a HD camera and the glass on that particular lens is a high quality. I’ll let you check out the comparison of the video for yourself.

Watch this video at its full size at Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1.

PS: for a review of this camera see it at Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 Review on my photography blog.

Video Transcription

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Darren: Hi there. It’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with a new camera for these video posts. You’re actually not viewing video taken with that camera right now because I want to show it to you in person. The camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMCGF1, the Lumix GF1. The reason I’m talking about is … is the amount of people that emailed me after I put up my first post with it, asking me what the camera was. Obviously the video that it was producing was a little bit clearer, and thing that people were commenting about, particularly with the video and I’ll link to it, was the depth of field. What you will notice with this camera on the video and perhaps I’ll insert a little bit of it into this clip, is that the background was really out of focus in comparison to this video released on … assuming this video will be.

The reason for that is that this camera comes with this lens. It’s a prime lens in that it doesn’t have a zoom. It’s a 20 mm lens so it’s a reasonably wide-open lens so you get quite a wide angle on it, but its aperture is 1.7. The aperture is how big the lens opens up and really this lens is a very fast lens, what they call a fast lens because it allows a lot of light in at once, and when you open up the lens that big, it actually makes the depth of field a lot shallower, so what I am here, I’m in focus but what’s back there will be out of focus when you’re shooting with this lens.

The lens I’m shooting with now, this camera that you’re viewing me on now, is a Canon S90 and it’s aperture I think is, let me have a look here, I think it ranges from 2 to 4.9 depending on the focal length. So it’s not as fast and as a result you’ll find that the depth of field is less shallow and so you get more in focus back there, which is fine if you want to keep everything in focus, but to get everything out of focus back there actually makes you as the subject stand out a little bit.

I am now shooting on the Panasonic GF1. This, the camera that I was shooting with before, much smaller camera – a Canon – and really does take a reasonable quality video. But the other thing that I like about the Panasonic is because you’ve got this really wide aperture it lets a lot of light in. You can actually shoot video in a darker room, without quite as much light. At the moment I’m shooting and it is sunny outside so I’ve got a fair bit of light coming in, but the video that I first shot this on, it was on quite a gloomy day and I wasn’t sitting in really open light situation, and yet because of that nice wide open lens it let a lot of light in. So hopefully you can see a bit of difference between this video and the one that I shot before on this. Both, personally I could go with either one. This one to me is just a little bit nicer and like I said before it’s a little bit sharper and that depth of field gives it a nice effect as well. So I hope you can see a bit of the difference now so I might just go back to the other video.

So anyway, it’s a Panasonic Lumix DMCGF1. It’s not the cheapest camera out there. It’s what they call a “micro four thirds” camera so it’s a new type of camera sort of in between the point and shoot and the digital SLR. It takes a really nice still shot as well. It’s a little bit smaller than a full sized digital SLR but it has a little bit more power than something like the Canon that I’m shooting this on at the moment.

I personally prefer to have a still camera that takes good quality video over having a good still camera and a good video camera separate, I like to have them in the one thing so I can just carry the one thing around. The good thing about this camera is that it’s got detachable lenses so you can add other ones.

The reason I’ve got this one is … is because it is so fast and really all the reviews that I’ve read of all of the other lenses that fit on this, this one leaves them for dead. It’s the 20 mm 1.7. So you can get this as a kit together. It’s not the cheapest camera in the world but the quality of it is really great.

Anyway, that’s the camera I’m using at the moment. I’d love to hear what sort of camera you use in the comments below.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What Camera Am I Using for My Video Posts? The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1

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A few weeks back, Stephan Spencer (one of my Art of SEO coauthors) authored a post for SearchEngineLand entitled 36 Myths that Won’t Die But Need To. I certainly recommend checking out the post, but be warned of some highly contentious comments. The tweets and offline feedback were similarly up-in-arms and it’s easy to understand why.

SEO is a field where reputation is a huge part of your ability to perform well. Because the search engines don’t publish comprehensive guidelines (or even guidelines that cover 1/10th of the material necessary for good SEO work), businesses rely on the savvy of individual consultants, contractors and employees. If your boss reads Stephan’s article and sees him contradicting advice that you’ve been giving for years, faith erodes and with it, job security. Luckily (or perhaps unluckily), there’s probably 5-10 articles you can find on the web that support your side of the story, many from quality, trusted sources.

The lack of standards sucks. But, it’s also the reason our industry is so exciting. New experiments & experiences can reveal critical data about search engine operations. The ability to become an expert is open to anyone with the skills and perseverance to see it through. But, no matter how hard you try, it’s hard to overcome some of the persistent myths of the SEO field – I’ve been caught in plenty of them myself (and who knows, maybe still am today).

This post is going to look at some of those nagging, lingering falsehoods that continue to thwart good SEO efforts, specifically those that Stephan called out and faced strong resistance. As always, this is my opinion, based on my experience (see the moz disclaimer) except in cases where research and data exists, in which case it’s my opinion that the research cited is good enough to warrant that opinion

How Significantly Does Personalization Affect Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Although it is true that Google personalizes search results based on the user’s search history (and now you don’t even have to be logged in to Google for this personalization to take place), the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are relatively minor. Check for yourself. Get in the habit of re-running your queries — the second time adding &pws=0 to the end of Google SERP URL — and observing how much (or how little) everything shifts around.

Comments Include:

I’m not sure I agree with your statement under #5 that personalization changes are “relatively minor”. I’ve been seeing some drastic rank changes due to personalization. I just posted about it at http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/49-are-google-serp-personalizations-relatively-minor.whtml While there are still “absolute rankings” that display most of the time, your site can be ranked much higher or lower, based on personalization.

My Opinion – They’re both right. Personalization seems to primarily affect areas in which we devote tons of time, energy and repeated queries. This means for many/most "discovery" and early funnel searches, we’re going to get very standardized search results. It’s true that it can influence some searches significantly, but it’s also true that, at least in my experience, 90%+ of queries I perform are unaffected (and that goes for what I hear/see from other SEOs, too). The linked-to post above actually helps to validate this, showing that while rankings changes can be dramatic, they only happen when there’s substantive query volume from a user around a specific topic.

Do We Need to Update Our Homepages Every Day to Maintain Rankings?

Stephan Says:

"It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.)" This is another fallacy spread by the same aforementioned fellow panelist. Plenty of stale home pages rank just fine, thank you very much.

Comments Include:

It actually is important. Sure, a stale home page might rank, but Google definitely takes freshness into account in rankings. I’ve seen rankings boosts whenever I post new content.

This varies from niche to niche, of course a site can rank well whilst remaining static, it may also have a considerable number of links pointing to it. In a competitive niche where the link volume/quality is pretty even, then regular updates to the home page, and other pages within the site can make all the difference – to describe this as a fallacy is a fallacy itself.

My Opinion - There was a time when I was pretty convinced this was true. I did lots of testing around it for my clients sites and would put in time each day making sure new content appeared on their homepages. Today, I’m much less of a believer. Stephan is certainly correct that plenty (if not the overwhelming majority) of homepages and, indeed, web pages that rank well for many queries are static. I do think it’s a great idea to continually have new content linked-to from homepages – by linking to the latest blog posts, YOUmoz posts and marketplace postings, the SEOmoz homepage helps drives spiders to revisit frequently and crawl these new posts (though RSS pings may make that obsolete).

Overall, I wouldn’t advise updating pages just for the sake of possibly getting a "fresh content" boost. QDF operates on unique, fresh, individual pages (or older pages that are earning newly fresh links). I’d have serious doubts as to whether anything in Google’s ranking system rewards pages that simply change frequently – it doesn’t pass my smell test.

How is Google Treating "Reciprocal" Links?

Stephan Says:

Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings. Particularly if done on a massive scale with totally irrelevant sites, right? Umm, no. Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount. Having your own version of the Yahoo directory on your site isn’t helping your users, nor is it helping your SEO.

Comments Include:

Google places less weight on reciprocal links that they used to, but they still count. I’ve done numerous link exchange campaigns for websites, and seen huge boosts in rankings. At the end of the day, would you rather have a reciprocal link from another site in your niche, or no link at all? The answer is obvious.

Reciprocal links aren’t necessarily of dubious value. Consider this example:

I’m a news site. I link to CNN because it’s CNN and they have news. One day, CNN links to me (huzzah). Technically, this is a reciprocal link, but no way in hell is Google going to discount the value of the link because the sites are linking to each other. So now you have to determine intent — and how do you do that?

In many niches, every authority site links to every other. Not only is it natural, but these are the most relevant possible links. So what you seem to be saying is that Google lowers the value of a site’s most relevant links — thereby increasing the relative value of irrelevant or off-topic ones. That makes sense how?

My Opinion - This one really depends on how we’re defining "reciprocal links."

The post you’re reading links to Stephan’s SELand article. Would Stephan updating that post with a link here potentially hurt both our rankings? No.

However, if SEOmoz built a link directory on our site (ironically humorous because, as long time readers may recall, we used to have one) and promoted linking to your site if you reciprocated with a link back here, I’d be more concerned. This is essentially link graph manipulation and while it’s a fine line to tread, plenty of folks have crossed it in the past and, as Stephan notes, unnatural reciprocal link behavior is remarkably easy to spot on a link graph.

I wouldn’t be concerned at all with a technically "reciprocated" link, but I would watch out for schemes and directories that leverage this logic to earn their own links and promise value back to your site in exchange. Also – watch out for those who’ve evolved to build "three-way" or "four-way" reciprocal directories such that you link to them and they’ll link to you from a separate site – it’s still attempted manipulation and there’s so many relevant directories out there; why bother!?

Keyword Density is Not Used – How Many Times Do We Have to Say It?

Stephan Says:

Keyword density is da bomb. Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly.

Comments Include:

Folly? Hardly. If you’re trying to rank for a keyword, you want to make sure you use it a few times on a page. That’s just common sense. Of course, you don’t want to overuse a keyword, or it might come across as spammy. Any smart SEO pays attention to KW density.

My Opinion - Again, we’re likely coming down to semantics. The formula for keyword density – a percentage of the total number of words on the page that are the target phrase – is indeed folly. IR scientists discredited this methodology for relevance decades ago. Early search engines and information retrieval systems already leveraged TF*IDF as a far more accurate and valuable methodology.

In my opinion, the reason the myth persists is that sometimes, optimizing towards a keyword density can actually improve your relevance and targeting of TF*IDF. I’ll make an analogy – let’s say you believe flight is accomplished not by lift, thrust, drag and weight, but rather by reaching a particular velocity in a bird-shaped device. It’s entirely possible that you might stumble upon flight, or flight-like elements even without understanding the physics. That said, could you honestly call yourself an aeronautics engineer?

If we’re going to call ourselves professional SEOs, we should bother to learn the science. Yes, adding additional instances of a keyword term or phrase to a page might indeed help your rankings (usually not massively and almost never in highly competitive spaces), but that does not mean that the keyword density average you’ve been using is accurate or that engines leverage the metric. Spreading this ignorance of math and science does little to further the SEO field’s reputation - let’s end it. 

Do Hyphens in Domain Names Really Suck for SEO?

Stephan Says:

Hyphenated domain names are best for SEO. As in: san-diego-real-estate-for-fun-and-profit.com. Separate keywords with hyphens in the rest of the URL after the .com, but not in the domain itself.

Comments Include:

Hyphens in domain names are less than ideal for flagship businesses because they’re hard to communicate, but you better believe Google ranks domains with keywords in them highly, even if they contain hyphens. Again, it’s less than ideal (a hyphen-less .org or .net is preferable to a hyphenated .com), but if the top choices aren’t available, a domain that includes a hyphen can be a decent substitute.

Don’t make a blanket statement that having hyphens in your domain hurts your potential. This is just fallacy. Yes, hyphens suck for direct traffic, as the domain is more likely to spelled incorrectly. But when it comes to search, domains with hyphens in them do just fine.

My Opinion – They suck. Yes, I realize that technically, they may not have a formal algorithmic component (though I’m guessing part of Google’s spam filter early warning system does look at hyphens, particularly when there’s more than one in a domain name). But, they certainly correlate with worse branding value, which means fewer links and citations, less reputation in the eyes of visitors and potential business partners, less viral spread through word-of-mouth and, as the comments note, lower type-in traffic.

All of those are going to have a 2nd-order impact on rankings through metrics like inbound links, social mentions and usage data (to whatever degree you believe that mya be a signal). Thus, hyphens in domain names do, indeed, suck for SEO (and lots of other stuff). I’ve never liked SEO practices that operated in a vaccum or didn’t consider usability, virality, positioning, branding or other basic marketing techniques. Going back to the analogy above, it’s like the aeronautics engineer who doesn’t consider seats a necessity. Sure, it flies, but who exactly will pay for a ride?

Does Click-Through Rate Matter?

Stephan Says:

The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters. If this were true then those same third-world link builders would also be clicking away on search results all day long.

Comments Include:

Don’t assume that clickthrough rates don’t matter just because of some potential abuse that would happen if absolutely zero logic were built in.

In regards to CTR influencing rankings, there are a number of things that lead me to suspect that user behavior does affect search results.

I’m sure you are familiar with the so-called google \honeymoon period\ that seems to occur when a new site launches. The site will rank highly for a few weeks, and then see a dramatic drop in SERPs. I’ve launched over a dozen sites in the past year, and have noticed this pattern.

I believe this goes beyond QDF, it’s a site-wide phenomenon. The hypothesis is that Google will temporarily rank a new site highly, to see how users perceive the site. If people visit the site, and then immediately hit the back button to return to the SERPs, that’s a good signal that the site did not meet the needs of the user, and that google should not rank it as highly.

I am on the fence, I could literally flip a coin whether it is myth, magic, or the CTR really does make a difference. If it does it is such a small difference it’s nothing I would ever focus on for success.

My Opinion – I’ve written and spoken about this extensively in the past and it doesn’t need a great deal of re-hashing. I will, however, say that should any SEO ever discover that it substantively impacts rankings, we’re going to be faced with an army of zombie botnets trying to take over our computers not to send email spam, but to click on links through our "reputable" Google accounts. Just look at the hacks of Facebook, Twitter & WordPress over the past few weeks and ask yourself – if any spammer could show any financial incentive or ability of clicks to influence Google, would we really have as (organic) click-fraud free a world as we do today? 

We do have one data point from Google that suggests they look at some kinds of less manipulate-able click data. A Googler speaking at the first SMX East show in New York mentioned during his session that Google will record searches that are performed frequently with no clicks, followed by query refinement or abandonment, as potential searches that need work (because it seems no one likes the results). If this is what you mean when referring to click-data being used in the engines, I think that’s completely reasonable.

Do H1 Tags Help with Rankings?

Stephan Says:

H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO. Research by SEOmoz shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. Still, you should write good H1 headings, but do it primarily for usability and accessibility, not so much for SEO.

Comments Include:

H1 tags are very important, I’ve seen pages rank well for targeted keywords once the tag has been tweaked to be more targeted, not spammy or purely for SEO, but well written. Ok, in some cases it may not be “crucial” but after the title tag I think it’s up there as one of the most important on site factors.

My Opinion - Covario’s research is spot on; I got to listen to and speak with their chief scientist, Dr. Matthias Blume, at a conference in Silicon Valley. It also matches up to our correlation and rankings model data. You’re invited to repeat on-page keyword prominence testing and check the results for yourself (more on search engine testing methodologies here). H1 tags are very slightly better than Bold/Strong tags for keyword usage and both are barely better than simply using the keyword on the page (in any text format).

In every instance I’ve seen a report of H1s improving rankings, it’s been because the keyword phrase was now included as some of the first text on the page and provided an additional instance of the target term and title element in the on-page copy. As Stephan recommends in the comments, try taking a site with H1s and replacing them with CSS styles that mimic the text formatting. You may see tiny fluctuations in a few close rankings, but likely little else.

All that said, H1s are still a best practice. If you’re building a site from scratch today, you should certainly use them for headlines, and they do provide some (albeit quite tiny) benefits for SEO. However, I feel incredibly guilty about the many times in my SEO consulting career I pushed hard for engineering and development teams to get H1s right in the markup when it generated such tiny results. That time would have been far better spent on dozens of other projects. If I can, I’d love to save you that same embarassment and disappointment. H1s may fit with SEO stereotypes, but that doesn’t make them a high priority, high value activity. If you don’t believe the research of others, do your own, then listen to the results.

Can Linking to Other Sites Help You Perform Better?

Stephan Says:

Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings. Not true. Unless perhaps you’re hoarding all your PageRank by not linking out at all — in which case, that just looks unnatural. It’s the other way around, i.e. getting links to your site — that’s what makes the difference.

Comments Include:

Not true. Matt Cutts has said that linking out to high quality websites is one of the many factors that they use to evaluate a site. NOTE: the comment references the below copied text below from this post by Matt Cutts (on Google’s webspam team):

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

My Opinion – I suspect there may be some small, positive effects of linking out to relevant, quality sites and pages for SEO. However, Stephan’s likely correct in his assertion that just linking to a "high Domain Authority" or "high PageRank" site won’t normally help. He’s also right to say that hoarding link juice is likely a very bad move. You can listen to the NYTimes’ SEO, Marshall Simmonds, talk about how adding external links to articles on the site had a noticeable positive impact on the Times’ rankings and traffic.

I don’t have correlation or ranking models data on this, nor have we experimented internally to the degree that I’d feel comfortable calling this a settled debate. My instincts say Google probably considers outbound links in some form or fashion, but I doubt it’s a huge ranking factor. It might be more important than H1s, though

PageRank is a Good Predictor of Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings. If only this were true, our jobs as SEOs would be so much easier! It doesn’t take many searches with SEO for Firefox running to see that low-PageRank URLs outrank high-PR ones all the time. It would be naive to assume that the PageRank reported by the Toolbar Server is the same as what Google uses internally for their ranking algorithm.

Comments Include:

Come on now. It’s true that a lot of people place too much emphasis on PR, but let’s not take it to the opposite extreme and say it’s irrelevant. PR is not the be-all-end-all of rankings, but it still matters. Having a high PR homepage clearly means *something*.

I probably couldn’t disagree with anything more than this one. I guarantee a website that has homepage PageRank 6 and then 2 page deep pages having PageRank 5 and trailing off into 4’s and 3’s get’s WAY more traffic than the one with PageRank 3 and trails off into 2’s and 1’s. PageRank is not 100% accurate, but it’s an extremely good indicator, it’s not just make believe or useless non-sense that authoritative sites have PageRank; 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

My Opinion - They’re both right (though the "guarantee of traffic on the PR6 vs. 5 site" sounds like a bet this commenter’s opponent could win many, many times over). Our data on PageRank correlation is very solid and suggests that yes, PR is positively correlated with rankings on Google.com (though much less so in Google.co.uk – sorry Brits!). However, the degree of correlation is not overwhelming and there are far better single metrics if rankings correlation is your goal.

I would strongly get behind Stephan’s statement that what the toolbar server reports is not what Google uses internally. They’ve messaged this many times. It’s also very true that PageRank is only one of a plethora of ranking signals, and plenty of PageRank 3 pages outrank PageRank 6 or 7 pages for given queries.

Does Great Content Equal Great Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Great Content = Great Rankings. Just like great policies equals successful politicians, right?

Comments Include:

I see no one is criticizing "Great content = great rankings." This is job number one.

My Opinion – I think the commenter may have missed Stephan’s intended sarcasm. I am in full agreement that great content ≠ great rankings. This is no more true than the statement: "the way to win elections is to propose the best legislative ideas."

Marketing, promotion, networking, partnerships, virality, incentives and hundreds of others feed into the inputs for a site’s success on the web. Unless you believe that links are meaningless and Google’s content analysis systems can read and rank content like a human (e.g. Google thinks the Times’ article on Brown’s stepping down was more adroitly perceptive than the Post’s), the ability to draw in links, which is not and likely never will be about the "best content" will have an overwhelming impact on rankings.

The future likely holds greater usage of data from social media and social web interaction, but even this depends on far more than the content’s quality. Those brands and sites that have early-adopting, viral-sharing, people-connecting, idea-distributing users invested in promoting their work are likely to be long term winners with little regard for comparative levels of content quality. 

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There’s lots more fun and interesting discussion on the SearchEngineLand post, but hopefully these will spark some interesting chats in the comments here as well.

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I recently was chatting with a new blogger and they made the comment that after 3 weeks of blogging that they’d run out of things to write about. They had written 10 posts so far but felt that they’d nothing else to share of value on the topic.

What surprised me about their comments was that the blogger was actually a seasoned pro in their niche. They were new to blogging about their topic but they’d been working in their industry for 25 years and were seen as an expert in their field…. yet they didn’t feel like they had anything to say about the topic!

I dug a little deeper and it turned out that the reason for their issue was not that they didn’t have much to write about – but that they were taking for granted the level of knowledge that they actually had. Much of what they’d learned over the years was now so basic to them that they didn’t realise how valuable it was for someone at a lower level of expertise.

To use an old cliche – they were the type of person who has forgotten what most of us will ever know about their topic.

He said to me at one point – ‘I just want every post I write to be something that cuts new ground – something that says something great that no one has ever thought before.’

I’ve felt this way myself over the years (and still do). For me it often came about in those nervous moments before I’d go on stage to present about blogging. Doubts would creep in….”what do I know?”…. “my presentation is too basic”….. “what if people are too advanced for this?”….

The reality is though that 99% of people in the audiences I spoke to had a such basic understanding of my topic that what I often thought was basic was often a stretch for them.

Often in the Q&A times at the end of such presentations I’d realise to myself just how much I actually did know about my topic and how often in the search for my next profound post that unlocked the secrets to the universe that I was actually over looking a treasure trove of more basic but just as helpful topics.

I’m not suggesting that every post you write needs to rehash the basics of your topic – however I guess this is simple a challenge for those of us who sometimes struggle to feel we’ve got anything helpful and worthwhile to say to realize that we might be over thinking things and could probably serve our readers better by examining what we do know and sharing that.

Sidenote: I was having a discussion that touched on this today at Third Tribe when Valeria Maltoni commented – ‘I also take what I know for granted a lot.‘

I responded to her with:

“I think most of us have stuff in our head that we think is too basic to share with others however it’s real GOLD when we do share it because it’s often things that others are thinking about asking but are too scared – or its something that they need to know but don’t really know that they need it.“

How does one get to those Basic but Golden things?

A few ides for posts come to mind:

• Describe an experience that you’ve had
• Share a problem that you overcame and how you did it
• Give an example of where you learned an important lesson
• Tell the story of how you taught someone something
• Remember what it was like to be a beginner in your topic and outline the things you wish you’d known
• Share the answers to some questions that you or someone else once had

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What Are You Taking For Granted That Might Be Useful to Others?

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Most people with smartphones keep their devices covered with some sort of protective case.  However, did you know that many of those cases still allow debris and dirt to get to your phone, which could ultimately cause scratches?

For this reason, Wrapsol created a unique film that protects mobile and other electronic devices. The film is clear for the front of the device and has a matte finish for the back.

Although Wrapsol protects from scratches and nicks, it is not bulky. In fact, users could even put a protective case over the film if they desired.

Wrapsol’s products are currently available on their site but will soon appear in stores such as Office Depot, Best Buy, and Staples.

Todays post in the Best of ProBlogger 2009 series looks at the topic of making money from blogs. By no means is it a comprehensive or complete guide to the topic but below are 12 of the more popular posts we’ve had on the topic this year.

1. The Importance of Having Your Own Product to Sell
2. How to Make $30,000 a Year Blogging
3. The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business
4. 5 Ways to Make Money Blogging Once You Have Traffic
5. $72,000 in E-books in a Week: 8 Lessons I Learned
6. How to Find Direct Advertisers for Your Blog
7. How I use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money
8. What is Affiliate Marketing?
9. How to Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote
10. 11 Lessons I Learned EArning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program
11. 10 More Amazon Associate Program Lessons I Learned on My Way to Six Figure Earnings
12. Should I Add a Donation Button to My Blog?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Make More Money From Your Blog in the New Year : Best of ProBlogger

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