It’s Up, It’s Down… What’s Going on Here?

There’s a lot of noise around the ‘Net about Google’s update. No matter how many people say “Oh well, Google doesn’t matter…” you still can’t avoid the “The update is REAL now!”. I would be completely remiss if I didn’t jump on the bandwagon.

Actually, that’s not true. I’m not doing it because I want to be on the bandwagon. I’m writing about it because two of my blogs jumped in pagerank. One of the went from 0 to 3. Of course, I get no money from that blog, but that is not the point. This blog has gone from N/A to 2. I’m not really certain what all those datacenters are and which ones are important, but mostly I’ve got a 2 here and I’m happy with that.

Of course, reading about everything that’s been going on has made me think about what Google’s doing and what its motives are. Then I catch myself and wonder “Why do I care?” The simple fact is that it’s incredibly interesting to see all of the theories going about on the ’sphere. All the SEO guys and gals have decided that this is happening because of paid links or because of links that aren’t relevant to topic or because of really long blogrolls. I’m not so sure about that. The paid links I can get, but the links on blogrolls and to sites that aren’t completely relevant… Hmmmm.

So I did some surfing and did some completely unscientific analysis. Jon Swift has a very popular political blog and he links to anyone that links to him (to an extent: no porn or spammers). Some of his links aren’t relevant at all. And his links list is unbelievably long. Yet, his PR went up. My own political blog doesn’t have any paid links, but the links list is long (so long that I’ve split it in two categories) and that blog just got a Google juice injection- from 0 to 3. I link out a lot to other sites, as well. For instance, if I come across a quiz or article I find fascinating I’ll link to the site where I found it (as “H/T”: Hat Tip). I don’t worry about anchor text a whole lot over there because the sites I frequent from there don’t care about anchor text. I’ve seen other blogs (that I have on my other blogroll) go up in PR, too. None of them sell links, but they all link out frequently. As a matter of fact, it’s polite on that side of the blogosphere to use “H/T” or “Via” when something interesting is found through or on another blog (this is why I think it’s strange that this end of the ’sphere doesn’t do that). And that side of the blogosphere- the side that doesn’t use specific anchor text to link, though they do link heavily- doesn’t seem the least bit effected by the Google Smack.

I think this has everything to do with using keywords and phrases as anchor text. I mentioned on the forum today that I believe Google doesn’t care if I link “Check this out” but would care if I linked “the best mesothelioma site on the net”. See what the anchor text is in those examples? I think that Google is getting sick of seeing that kind of keyword rigging. Not so much the linkage, which doesn’t matter to some SEO experts, but the anchor text.

I haven’t really been all over the blogosphere looking to see if anyone shares my theory. I have seen a lot of thought about paid links and how to make them not look like paid links (by inserting “nofollow”, mostly). I haven’t seen anything linking the anchor text to the Smack Felt ‘Round the ‘Sphere™ and that kind of confuses me. I could get paid to write “This is the best site ever!” with a link to where ever. How would Google know it was paid? They wouldn’t, because the anchor text for that link is “This”. Now, if I wrote “Gambling Made Easy is the best site ever!”, well, Google’s going to raise an eyebrow and even, maybe, check that anchor text against other sites. And WHAMMO! Smack to the back of the head.

Perhaps someone needs to reconsider the importance of keyword anchor text as well as PR. I mean, if anyone is worried. Personally, I’m just going to keep on with whatever I’m doing. I’m still more concerned with PVs than PR. So, it’s all good in my world.

P.S.

I’m so over the drama. Good grief, I’m going back to politics. With politics the drama makes a lot more sense.

Finding the right Keywords

I have found a fabulous site that references ways to find popular searches of the day.

What People Search For- Most Popular Keywords

By Danny Sullivan | May 26, 2006

Millions of searches are conducted each day on popular search engines by people all around the world. What are they looking for? A number of major search engines provide a way to glimpse into the web’s query stream to discover the most popular search keywords or topics.

Then he goes on to give you a list of ways to check popular search engines for their keywords.

Google Trends the best. Simply because they provide an awesome graph to show you how keywords are faring throughout the day.

Click on one of the terms to the left of the graph and Google will show you how popular that particular search term is for that part of the day.

I clicked on “the bronx zoo star” because I was considering doing a post on that subject. As you can see from the graph Google has declared that particular term “Spicy”. Now if you click on the number 1 search term, “ufc 73 results”, you’ll see that it’s “Volcanic”.

Below the graph you’ll find the most popular news articles and blog posts regarding whichever search term you’ve chosen. And below those results you’ll find generic web results. As you can tell by the way the page is laid out, news and blogs are the most popular hits among Google search users.

Of course, for variety you could use all the keyword search options provided on “What People Search for”.

If you’re curious about the keywords you’ve chosen then try Google AdWords Selector tool. You can enter the keywords or enter the url of an entire site to analyze the keywords. One of my sites turns up “marriage” as the most popular keyword. Google suggests I buy AdWords based on that term. Interesting.

So, for those using SEO and keywords to drive traffic, I suggest utilizing Google and other keyword tools to help you in your efforts. Don’t forget to stop over at Searchenginewatch.com to get more tips and hints.