SEO Ibiza - Superior Small Business SEO

Blog integration for SEO and business purposes. - We’ve written about this in passing once or twice before, however it’s been in amongst other chatter, and not a “how-to” by any means.

And surprisingly enough, given the strength of our highly tuned powerhouse of a blog, we don’t actually rank highly enough for the phrase yet either, currently lingering around the bottom of the first page to top of the second. Clearly unacceptable for a superior seo services ranking machine like ours.   …So what better as another SEO Demo than using our thoroughly integrated blog to address both these issues now. As a consolation, this image is ranking Google #1 for blog integration (image search) ..click the link to try it.

Anyone who reads our nonsense over here on any kind of regular basis will probably have learned to read between the lines a little, because mostly what we don’t say is as important as what we do.

Much like our spec ops  brotherhood we don’t really agree with spoon-feeding lazy people with a step by step “how-to-do-something”  especially as the somethings are often of potentially great value. We are often torn between spelling it out in detail, and concerns about then having to face and compete with many and much more highly tuned competition.

So we tend to drop big clues, and expect (hope) that:

1. lazy / unintelligent people will miss or ignore them..
2. the deserving will do their homework or research and fill in the gaps themselves.

..So this isn’t a definitive “how to” either, this is still much too valuable commercial information to just publish in a lazy mans list for all and sundry to use, and as your parents probably told you “nothing worth having comes easily” or some regional variation of this theme, and it’s  true here too.

We’ve been closely monitoring user behaviour on the site and blog for a while now with Woopra and have to say that in all honesty we are a little disappointed with the general behaviour and lack of attention span that most visitors exhibit.

We can tell with reasonable accuracy who has gotten what (hidden and hinted at) points by tracking page behaviour and timings, and while there are definitely some that “get it” (a big shout out to the Brazilian crew, our Hungarian, Romanian and Portugese understanders)  ..the majority just wander in gormlessly, and skip on through learning nothing much.

But that’s ok, on reflection that’s how we like it, and from now on things may actually be getting even more cryptic,  ” ..horses to water”  and all that..

- this is possibly even modern day Darwinianism at work we think?

Anyway,  lets start out by defining what we mean by “blog integration”,  as although it is, it is also not simply installing a blog on your website on  …site.com/blog/ and posting and expecting it to just happen.

Firstly, apart from the technical issues involved in making the thing into a useful  business tool rather than just a long term waste of time and resources, you will need to master basic “blog user level” SEO which is not difficult, (we do a one-day seo training course package to this level) and this will be critical to the ultimate success of your business blog integration project.

We do not intend to go into that now, nor the multiple reasons why you should be thinking about integrating a blog into your business website, and will assume that you have done your research, understand the potential benefits and are now wondering how to go about it, and will pick it up from there.

It should also be noted that as we are talking about “integration” that it is implied that you already have a website, whether static or dynamic, otherwise we wouldn’t be integrating would we? - we would be setting up a CMS Based website, with blog,  there is a difference.

The first question is whether to set it up as subfolder or subdomain, ie.  domain.com/blog/ or blog.domain.com/ This is an important choice of direction, as the behaviour of the blog in the (Google) charts will be largely dependent on this decision, both having advantages and disadvantages and the decision will be largely based on your market, your competition, your current situation, and future aspirations.

There’s a long thread on webproworld with some good points made (and of course the usual deterioration into slagging matches too ) that covers most of the pros and cons of the two different options.

For us it was really a no-brainer, as the true potential of integration implies being able to feed new content through established rankings power very quickly, and the sub folder route is best suited to this. There are also considerations regarding the current levels and status of the main site though, and if you are likely to be taking the blog in very different directions to the main site at times, then the subdomain approach can also very work well.

The next choice again is platform, and for us again, another no-brainer,  it’s  Wordpress every time.  The extensive list of themes alone take some beating,  but the plugins, widgets & flexibility, combined with reasonable (not awesome by any means) SEO effectiveness straight out of the box make this a very comfortable easy choice.

It goes without saying of course that you now install (and properly configure) the usual SEO plugins, All-in-One-SEO, XML Sitemaps, and generally set up the blog to the standard “best practice” SEO  settings. Its not the aim of this article to address that, as there’s a million how to  “SEO your blog” articles, some better than others of course.

The awesome Joost de Valk’s Definitive guide to better rankings for your blog is probably the most comprehensive, and SEO Design Solutions 20 wordpress seo tips would also be a good place to start if you need help with this.

Ok, so we’ve got our shiny new wordpress theme set up, on our sub folder or domain, now what?  ..well, guess what, this is where you get to do some of that homework 

Integration-wise, a few things you should probably be thinking carefully about now are:

• routing of existing website’s internal (real) PR to the new blog
• most effective methods of linking between website and blog
• building layer upon layer of keyword relevance into theme “clusters”
• tags, categories, and how maybe .htaccess and 301s could maybe play a role?
• keywords, sniping, grouping, theming & siloing
• utilising the full SEO power of RSS to its max.
• ensuring that scapers picking up your feed definitely link back to you
• any theme mods that may help your SEO and efforts in general.

And without getting too specific, as a general theme now, PR, silo-ing, PR “mirroring” and redirection around the site with better (optimal) anchor text in particular.. 

Recommended further reading - setup / operational tips are loosely spread about in..

From the SEO Spec Ops group

Tactical linking tactics

CQSEO - The Art of SERP War

Forum threads 

V7N thread Blog integration

We’re relatively confident  that by spreading the information about and making people think, look and work for it, that only the just and worthy shall receive. The rest of you lazy-ass “now” generation - as you were, you can get back to your PSPs, Wiis or wtf ever else it is deteriorating your powers of concentration and critical analysis these days.

And if you should stumble across this post in a “blog integration” search and just want someone else to sort out the finer details, well you know where to mail, dont you?

Ibiza over and out.

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Google followed up on their July Toolbar Pagerank export with a minor burp today, affecting mainly internal pages from what we can see, seemingly reducing the supposed snapshot period further still, we now have white PR zer0s on this blog as recently as 11th August, and several pages past our previous end May cutoff point have gone PR3.

11 August is not even 2 weeks ago. Other than that, one client’s site has become another suspicious PR 3 (links don’t justify it) and not much else to report.

Much bleating from SEO civilian casualties on forums, dull.  ..People if you had a PR3 with no backlinks, it was never real, so losing it shouldn’t make you cry.

And if you suddenly wake up and find you have a PR4 from  Zero with no work, don’t go out and start trying to sell links, its not real either, it will correct itself next time round.

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Have you ever just looked in a combination of amusement and wonder at the gibberish spammers try to get onto your blog with their surreptitious software?

People moan about Akismet but it seems rock solid for us, but then as we aren’t on any of those pesky dofollow lists or engines we still aren’t being bombarded with too many manual spammers yet and so its easy enough for it to spot the automatic stuff. But that’s the point, anyone could spot this stuff, and yet still they ramp it up and press the button every night.

So knowing their success rates here (zero) and their likely success rates with Akismet in general (nil) you would have to assume that this cant be a very productive exercise in general? So we got to wondering who and what was trying to be achieved anyway, and this is where this latest batch got a bit more interesting.

This looks to us as may be second hand SEO company work, ie some of the benefactors of these links (should they successfully land anywhere) look like the kind of companies, organisations and sites who probably wouldn’t, and definitely shouldn’t) be engaging in blackhat blog link-spamming practices, and that any SEO company declaring itself “ethical” would not be recommending nor engaging in this on behalf of clients. But a lot of SEO companies sub out their link-building to cheaper companies, because they have not the expertise, or the time to do it for their clients themselves.

There’s one particular individual this week from IP: 200.63.42.136 who is going to be our volunteer lab rat for his cheek, so lets have a look through some of this guys clients, or at least sites or documents he want to link to for one reason or another.

..Happily he’s done a few flyby spam dumps lately so there’s plenty of example “client” sites to choose without having to use anything unsavoury, which in his defence, he does at least seem not to do, and that is to deal in really unsavoury spam ..sorry, phrase making us giggle.

So first comment one from Dee Ann(allegedly)  ..well, we like little animals even if they are spammers,  so she actually gets to keep her link. deeannstreasures.com

And then we’ve got multiple comments all from different names at the same IP as above all containing 8 ridiculous automatically and randomly generated words, like

lucubration perceptionism alephs skeleton refurnishment bothrium israelitism fibrotic

I mean wtf? why not at least use something legible? so it has half a chance of a lazy moderator missing it? Then there’s exactly 8 links in the body of each comment, with all sorts of one-off companies included, but randomly shuffled into different lists. We’ve sorted out the most interesting of them all into a few groups.

Firstly, lets start with the Church. There seems to be a good proportion on behalf of the Good Lord.  Lets put them all out there, maybe they can come and tell us the scenario, whether they are:

• God’s Chosen Mighty Spam Army, a-spammin’ in the name of the Lord!

• Leaving it to the SEO company doing their linkbuildin’, they are aware of what they do, its all in a good cause.

• As above but we not aware that our SEO company uses Spamanic internet practices and sacrifices cute little blogs in an obscene orgy of Linkspam lust.

Were going to be nofollowing their cheeky-assed links until we know their game at least. And because without wasting time inspecting their sites, well who are we linking to?

• Saint Andrew’s Lutheran Church, Grand Rapids, Minnesota ELCA
• Providence Presbyterian Church, Virginia Beach, Virginia
• Grace United Methodist Church, Baltimore
• Berkmar United Methodist Church
• Trinity Lutheran Healthy Church
• Dallas Baptist University

..and it wouldn’t be right if we didn’t have some Alien superhuman religion lumped in there too - the good ol’ Scientology loons.

• http://www.scientology-losangeles.org  / Celebrity Centre International …love this one, nice touch with the “celebrity” Sciento-freaks

We call on all of you doing the Spamlord’s work to renounce your sins! ..Come hither and confess and ye shall be saved.

and they hail from all sorts of companies, towns, tourist boards and civil service, fire, emergencies services etc presumably spamming on behalf of their town, nation or civic pride?Official sites spamming our comments

• Department of the Interior (DOI) Jobs
• King’s Lynn and West Norfolk Borough Council
• Lyon County Tourist Commission
• Morro Bay National Estuary Program
• First Nations’ Emergency Services Society

And then we have various small and not-so-small businesses represented

• J Kinney Florist
• Skyline Office Interiors
• Richey Resources
• A.F.Cruden Associates
• http://www.sevenowldojo.com
• Vivino, Jerry
• http://www.massageforeveryone.com/
• Greater Kansas City Dog Training Club
• http://www.alstom-sig.com/
• University Advancement
• http://www.faridaspassions.com
• Torros
• http://www.sbtravel.com/
• Grantham and Newark Sunbeds
• http://cindersite.homestead.com/
• Shawgo, Ryan

Now most of these could be said to be semi, if not respectable looking sites, depending I suppose on your idea of respectability. We haven’t dug into them for hidden text or any other No-No’s or anything, we can’t be bothered, after all they may not even know they’re being promoted by these relentless spam comments.

We did have a flick around one or two of them quickly though and some of them are the real deal.  Proper real sites, and often with Pagerank to match.Mostly 3’s and 4’s with a couple of PR7’s floating about.

So what’s going on here? are these sites supposedly, (or possibly, bearing in mind the likely low success rates of this) benefiting from black-hattery on their behalf that they’re not aware of? Or that they are aware of?

Or is someone trying to damage them by including them on these type of comments without their knowledge? Maybe the spammer is hiding one paying customer in amongst lots of innocent victims. Or just grouping all his clients into 8’s ? …Or what exactly ?

Now what we’re really hoping is that (one of) our (7) readers will go off and work it out and report back via comments. that would be Ace 
But actually they probably won’t so plan (b) is that someone contact someone who knows these people and they report back via comments. that would be almost as good.

And actually that probably wont happen either, so at some point we might have to go and have a snoop around and maybe mail some owners or something.

Anyone who comes over here and tells the story can have a real link to their site and if anyone hasn’t told you Ibiza linklove is hot.  ..much better than some spam comment link we promise.

We’re not internet detectives or anything, but I mean, I  would want to know if mine or anyone else’s sites I knew, were on these comments, it probably doesn’t do you a whole lot of favours Google-wise with the types of places these comments do get through, and it’s quite likely you’ll find your company link in the company of some pretty unsavoury or nasty stuff on unguarded and heavily spammed blogs.

So if in the spirit of the Olympics someone else wants to pick up this particular baton and run with it, do be our guests, we’re off to the beach.

PS Or if the soppy SEO “company” (or hardcore blackhat team) whatever you are,  objects to your fame or notoreity too strongly please contact us and let us know your story and depending on how nice you are, or scared of you we are we’ll go from there.

Really if you could just stop your nonsense on our blog that would be all we ask.

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So hot on the heels of our first Ibiza Radio Alliance comes the second of the duo we really wanted to team up with, Ibiza Global Radio.

This station is the soundtrack of our winter here and along with Ibiza Sonica dedicate themselves to pumping out Ibiza’s unique electronica over the airwaves, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, and to the whole world over the internet.

We their met two lovely representatives  in a most pleasant meeting this afternoon (Hi Ladies) and we were fortunate enough to get a sneak preview of the brand new website due for relaunch literally any day now.

We greatly look forward to working with Ibiza Global as well as Sonica, and roll on Ibiza’s global domination of electronic music via internet radio..

…now all we need is a superstar DJ or two…   (already arranged, watch this space )

Ibiza out.

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So this is just a fast indexing post for a couple of friend’s new websites..

..firstly Blue Index Data Storage - from their new site - www.blueindex-data.com

“Blue Index Data, your data storage management company, offer fully comprehensive data storage and records management services. Blue Index offer storage solutions for your paper and digital archives“.

We may or may not end up with this one, depending on how things go with it, good luck guys. …And secondly as a favour to our young Mr Luis Puerta - Decorador - whose considerable decorating (Interor Design although he hates that title) talents can now be found showcased on can be seen on his pretty new website www.luispuerta.com

Blue Index is brand new, and Luis’ site has steadfastly refused to index however many times he has submitted it to Google’s addurl page, so we promised him last night we’d roast it alive with some searing Ibiza link-power, so that Google have to sit up and pay attention.

Luis is also not a client as such, he only wanted a website because he “ought to have one”, and is busy enough without extra business from it.

A nice position to be in. To all at Blue Index & Luis Puerta - SEO Ibiza wish you well.

The rest of you move along now, nothing to see here…

16 Aug, sites cached, links nofollowed.

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As the global credit crunch starts to bite deep, businesses the world over are feeling the pinch, along with the consumers whose cutbacks in spending are causing the problems.

Shrewd businesses, and those who have been around the block once or twice and seen it all before know only too well that in hard times, as well as working harder, you also have to work smarter to make it through.

Often as the cashflow dwindles, a business’ first instincts are to cut back on spending on all non-essential items, and this is where a fatal mistake is so often made, in that traditionally, advertising was often seen as one area that was optional.

This could not be further from the truth.

Many businesses have gone under due to killing their advertising budget at the most critical time,  when all the smarter businesses knew that far from reducing advertising and marketing spend, it should be increased.

Hard times should be seen as an opportunity to increase your market share, by poaching from your struggling competitors as they reduce their market presence, and ultimately remove their lesser business genes from the Darwinian business gene pool. 

Ask any business who has been around long enough to survive a recession or two, and this approach is nearly always the same, as your competitors go under, through making this most basic mis-judgement, your increased market presence and customer awareness means that you can pick up their old customers, now looking for a new supplier and actually emerge from the period stronger, if a little leaner.

Being as SEO is a relatively new discipline and we havent really seen a global recession on this scale like this since the late 80’s, and some are saying since the Great Depression in 1921, it certainly seems like the minor blip after 9/11 will seem pretty insignificant by the time this one is finished anyway,  this will be the first time this is applicable with SEO as the subject, but as Search advertising and marketing have to a large extent bitten very deeply into traditional advertising formats, Radio, TV & The Printed Media (…where do you think Google’s billions have come from ultimately?)  we can safely assume that the SEO-savvy businesses can apply the same logic to SEO in this recession, as the business savvy ones have done in the previous recessions, and that businesses that make SEO work well for them during the difficult times to come, should emerge leaner and stronger, having actually picked up market share from their dying competitors along the way.

Business SEO Services have never been more important as they will prove to be for the duration of the credit crunch,and the global recession that inevitably follows. Businesses both large and small will all have to decide our business strategies over the coming months and years, and the value of SEO Services will be a part of that decision making process.

As we are old enough to have seen this all before, we urge you to make your upcoming decisions wisely.

Luckily as an SEO Company ourselves, we don’t have to ponder the worth of Search Engine Optimisation to our own business, and we will continue ever onwards on our chosen path of Global SEO Domination but be assured we will feel the pressure from the credit crunch very acutely, through increased pressure to perform above and beyond the call of duty, and to ensure that it is OUR customers (who mostly become our friends very quickly too) who are the ones who emerge through the other side of the troubled times ahead, in as good as shape as possible.

We wish you all the very best of luck in the times to come.

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So while the SEO Spec Ops group have asked for a leave of absence to go off and give the Living TV’s Ibiza series producers a good Google slapping for their betrayal and total misrepresentation of our amazing home once again, we’re cracking on with the more serious business of SEO as usual.

One of the other things that caught our attention this week was the fact that a lot of people’s rank scanning software apparently all stopped working on Google at the tail end of last week.

Google have never made any secret of the fact that they disapprove of automated scanning, as is their right, because it’s their resources & bandwidth being used, so they can do what they want. However with software that accurately emulates human searchers, with pauses and gaps, and takes as long to run the reports as to do it by hand would anyway, we don’t feel there’s too much wrong with leaving a program to do the gritty work for us, after all that’s what computers were invented for, no?

What did irritate us immensely about this (more than the August tourist’s driving standards in Ibiza, and that’s pretty damn irritating, be assured) is not the fact that Google change things about and software stops working, this is their right, its their search engine, they can do what they want, but it’s the petty evangelising from certain “holier than thou” SEO Types about how rank scanning has no part in SEO anyway, and that we should all be focusing on traffic & conversions like they do, la la la..  <gag>

I mean duh, ..obviously..??!!

But these people feel that they are so clever or so advanced or whatever their problem is,  that they are qualified to go and rant at others on Search Engine Land, with their blatent misapprehensions that they are superior because they don’t show clients their actual rankings anymore..

what’s the matter,  ..get fed up of making excuses for the fact they went down again not up, for the 3rd week in a row? :)  …Not confident enough in your abilities to risk showing the client a clear picture of what you did to their rankings week on week?

Which of these brainboxes is going to come on here and tell us that they “focused on other metrics, traffic, conversions etc”  and improved all of these without first getting better rankings ? Ya whatever.  That’s like saying “it’s not important how much I earn from my job,  its the return on my investments that I make using my salary that matters.”

…ONE IS NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE FROM THE OTHER, EINSTEIN

It’s the chicken and egg scenario, very few people can improve both traffic and conversions (without paying for advertising) without first obtaining better rankings.  ..duh!

And are you seriously trying to tell us you would just do a few manual searches for a phrase or two, and if they are not in the first 3 pages you’d just forget all about them and focus on your superior metrics again? LOL! no wonder you don’t dare run ranking reports to show your customers anymore and try to fudge the issue with less clear “metrics” 

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post, this post is about why we do use rank scanning a fair bit, and how it mostly has nothing to do with showing customers ranking reports.

We do a lot of Google watching and it’s through this close observation of the keyword / SERP relationship in reaction to changes that we’ve come to develop a fairly finely honed sense of what each and every particular change we make to a site will do.

On a basic level, regular rank scanning has given us the ability to understand fairly accurately a site’s current state of optimisation, and it’s current SEO potential (ie with no further link power pointed at it) on a change by change basis, ie. - we change page titles, it will climb this much, we do this, that’s worth another 2 pages or places, rework this, another 5 places, and overall we can estimate, pretty accurately  where it will end up when we’ve fully optimised it with the onsite work.

Rank scanning has also given us a good understanding of how Google reacts to things.

We’ve often termed this the “Google Bounce” it’s kind of like a Sinewave that reduces in amplification over time, a bit like how when you drop a rubber ball, it bounces high, falls, bounces again but a little lower, falls again etc, until it settles at it’s new position in the charts. We also know how long it does that for, and when we should expect it to settle, for each type of change made.

It also means that we don’t worry about how or where a site is ranking for a keyword after changes, until the point we know it should have stopped,  and that from it’s high bounce point and it’s low bounce point, we can predict roughly where it will end up, within a matter of days, even though it wont usually end up there until some weeks down the line.

But most importantly we feel that close studying of keyword rankings over time, and in reaction to changes made onsite, also allows one to see the bigger picture much more clearly.

We know when something big is going down, (although not usually what of course, until Google come clean a bit later on) ..whether that be algo shifts, testing stuff, infrastructure upgrades etc etc, and for example the new “weekend index” which we had seen and long suspected for a while, but first saw someone else write about over on SEO Design Solutions (of course, where else? ) ..on one of the most advanced posts we’ve read in a long time: Google’s weekend index

This was was only noticed on our part by the process of constant monitoring of keyword rankings on our own experimental sites, and seeing different, regular SERP pattern changes every Friday to Sunday/ Monday from the more usual Google flux.

So please, before anyone jumps to any further conclusions about the use of rank scanning software in SEO and as to it’s value in comparison to your much more advanced “traffic and conversion metrics”  please wonder again, if its just possible some might actually be looking into things just a tad more deeply than you are.

..It would seem some have a fairly narrow minded view of what SEO should be..

Anyway rant over,  SEO on the beach team over and out.

PS anyone with any further observations regarding Google’s different weekend index please do say Hi on the comments and let us know your thoughts. 

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Living in Ibiza as we do, we obviously have a taste for good music.

Personally we like all sorts of music, but must confess to a particular liking for Ibiza’s cutting edge electronica.

Not so much the overpaid sets touted by the global superstar DJs for a few short months in the summer at the Islands absurdly expensive superclubs, but more the music played all year round by the Island’s unsung heroes, the local Radio stations, the best of whom have been broadcasting globally on internet radio for a good while now.

So we’re going on a bit of a mission to try and bring this to a wider audience than they currently enjoy, (which is not insignificant by any means by the way)  its just that we think we can hopefully improve it further still.

So along the lines of our already well established Ibiza Voice alliance we’re proud to anounce the first of our Internet Radio Alliances with the excellent Ibiza Sonica.

We haven’t actually started work on the site yet, and will possibly also be working with another Ibiza Radio station (talks underway) as well, but suffice to say Ibiza Music Radio will be coming your way in the Google SERP shortly if we have anything to say with it..

Hasta Luego amigos

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Yep it’s true,  a thread on DP tonight prompted a quick check inside Webmaster Tools and sure enough the Aug 01 sitelinks update was kind to us too, as you can see

click the pic above for a bigger view..

And our relentless march on the big terms as documented in our post a few weeks back, SEO Demonstration - the full story continues, we’re now into the 70’s for both SEO & SEO Services..

The one year cutoff point is 17 Nov 08.

What do you reckon, top 10 by then?

If we didn’t have so many bloody clients wanting all their sites SEO’d we’d be relatively confident, but as it is, we think it will be close..

In the meantime, in the words of the great Cartman..

“Respect our Authoritaii!! ”

.A

.

Edit, there was a time a while ago when only the authority sites in the search had these, and although most Authority sites still do,  it would appear the rules have changed a bit lately and you no longer need to be an authority, although of course..

..we still are.. 

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So the update post to Friday’s Google Pagerank Update alert.

We’ll start with the usual disclaimer “Toolbar doesn’t matter yada yada yada..” and then cut to the chase , well actually, judging by the virtual hysteria on various forums,  it actually matters quite a lot,  to quite a lot of people. 

Everybody knows it’s unreliable, and no it isn’t the full picture, and yes you do get all sorts of random and erroneous figures from it from time to time, but to be fair they mostly do tend to correct themselves next time round.

As suspected our friend’s suspicious pagerank figures from the last time round have corrected themselves from an unlikely PR 5 to a far more likely (and justifiable by IBLs) PR1.

Analysis across the board of both our own and our client sites shows another pretty good update in general,  there’s only one client in particular who was hoping for a promotion from PR5-6 who will be disappointed no matter how much we explain the vagueness and often irrelevance to the actual SERP performance, but lets face it people like Pagerank.

..Google aren’t stupid, far from it, they know this, which is probably why the toolbar continues onwards in it’s present form.

But it’s the “snapshot” element of this that interests us most, because although “T3h Real PR“ updates daily, and is a much more accurate figure (available realtime to Google employees) they don’t want SEOs (or anyone) knowing too accurately what’s happening in realtime and so they take a snapshot of a while back

<<<———-  probably using this 

…and then every now and then they export that out to give the rest of us at least a vague idea of the level (a while back) ..Obviously, if you could place the snapshot date with any accuracy you’d have a much better idea of where you are.

Lately it has often seemed to us that the actual snapshot date was maybe more recent than the oft stated 8-12 weeks, but research this time is indicating to us that we think the snapshot date (for us) was between 19th & 25th May.

We’ve come to this conclusion by looking at a few blogs, but mainly our own,  and you can see that while this post SEO experiments has received the PR, the next one on the 24th May Wordpress Theme Competition hasn’t, and everything thereafter remains greyed out.

On the spec ops blog we have a post from the 16th May that has received the PR package, and everything from the 22nd May onwards is still greyed out.

A quick look around some of our other favourite SEO blogs shows a post about competitive keywords with the gift of PR on the 20th May but nothing after that, so that would appear to suggest the 8 week period is still about right, for most of us, anyway…

On investigating (a little bit) further though, what is interesting, is that the cutoff date for the export appears maybe to be variable depending on of the level of domain PR?

i.e. for those of us with what Google would probably term “low” PRs it’s as above, but when you start looking at Blogs with higher Pageranks, this date seems to move forwards, we had a mosey around the likes of Boing Boing, Matt Cutt’s blog and a few others and they have posts from much later onwards than our seeming cutoff date showing either Toolbar greenery, or the white PR0 rather than the grey N/A reading.

Matt has a post about hacked sites on the 25th May with a PR4, and then although there was then nearly a month’s gap between posting, not returning again with a cat post until 24th June, all his June posts and in fact everything right up until the iPhone post on 19th July is showing the white PR0,  only from then on does it seem to be greyed out like the rest of ours.

So could it be that higher the domain PR, the later your relative cutoff date for the Toolbar export?

We know that higher PR sites are crawled more frequently, perhaps that higher Pagerank “pressure” just propagates though the site better, seeming to give a later cutoff point, or maybe it’s just because Matt just really knows what he’s doing with his blog, structure wise

Your thoughts / comments on Toolbar PR & export cutoff dates are more than welcome, because Telefonica are up to their usual tricks today with ultra slow loading pages and we’re not that bothered that we can be arsed to go through loads of blog posts to confirm this possible observation..   ..especially as it’s Sunday today, we’d rather someone else either confirm or rubbish this to be honest..

What we do know is that we would love to get a glimpse of the realtime live readings, we think Google should at least show us what the matrix looks like, even if not actually a glimpse of our own real figures… 

SEO on the beach team are off to the beach again, …over and out…

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