Google's PageRank is an influential algorithm that uses a model of Web use that is dominated by its link structure in order to rank pages by their estimated value to the Web community. This paper reports on the outcome of applying the algorithm to the Web sites of three national university systems in order to test whether it is capable of identifying the most important Web pages. The results are also compared with simple inlink counts. It was discovered that the highest inlinked pages do not always have the highest PageRank, indicating that the two metrics are genuinely different, even for the top pages.
 

What is <span style="font-weight:bold;">Google PageRank</span>? <span style="font-weight:bold;">Google Directory</span>? <span style="font-weight:bold;">Google Indexing</span>? How do you succeed in each of these Google areas?

<span style="font-weight:bold;">Google PageRank</span> is a Google algorithm that measures the worth of EACH webpage based on the links or other webpages that reference it. Like the Voter is to the Candidate, consider each external reference (link) to your webpage as a <span style="font-weight:bold;">VOTE of Importance</span> for that specific webpage. Democratically, the more votes (links) your webpage receives the better your Google PageRank. But were it that simple. Google also measures the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Importance of each Voter's webpage</span> and weighs this in the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Vote of Importance calculation</span>. So you see, important webpages bring more importance (greater Vote Value) to your webpage!

<u>Bottom Line</u>: Linking, Links For Trade, Reciprocal Links and getting listed in the thousands of Directories, Blogs, and Ezines all promote Votes of Importance for your webpages. This is an ongoing lifelong endeavor by Webmasters and SEO experts.

<span style="font-weight:bold;">Google Directory</span> is where you go to get your entire website included in a Google Catalogue organized by Category or Topic. You would think that getting listed in the Google Directory would be a well defined process just like it is clearly outlined in most of the top directories:
(1) Website URL
(2) Title of Website
(3) Short Description of website and
(4) maybe keywords that best represent your website.
 

But not so with Google Directory! Google outsourced this critical inclusion to the Google Directory to another Directory Organization called The Open Directory Project or DMOZ. Why does Google entrust such a crucial element of Directory Cataloguing to an outside organization? You are even more perplexed by this Google outsourced function when you discover that The Open Directory Project is a organization of Volunteer Editors! Yes, a host of no-credential individuals somehow freely donate their time to apply strict and ethical editorial rules to each submitted URL. And this wonderful world of volunteers ensures a trusted process resulting in consistent, fair and quality listings in both the DMOZ and Google Directories! Believe It or Not! But my distaste for the whole DMOZ thing will be detailed in another article.

<u>Bottom Line</u>: You must submit to DMOZ - The Open Directory Project and IF, and I MEAN A BIG IF, you get listed in The Open Directory (months but who knows because there is NO Feedback or Status mechanism in place), then Google might also extract your DMOZ listing information and place it into the Google Directory. GOOD LUCK!

<span style="font-weight:bold;"> Google Webpage Indexing</span> is the more predictable process and can be accomplished by submitting your website URL to Google. To ensure that Google Robots crawl through ALL of your webpages for your website, you must create an XML Sitemap of your entire website and let Google know it exists in your website directory where the Google Robots will use it. This XML Sitemap will get all your webpages Indexed in Google. Google even references a website that will FOR FREE generate XML Sitemaps and HTML, TXT and ROR versions of the Sitemaps as well. And Good News! <span style="font-weight:bold;">By January 2007 Yahoo and MSN will also use the Google XML Sitemap file to crawl your website! </span>

<u>Bottom Line</u>: Always submit and re-submit Google XML Sitemaps whenever you add new pages, products, anchor text or links to your website. Search Engine Robot Crawlers love websites that are changing, dynamic and adding new content.

These days a lot of search engine optimization companies are springing out on the web market. So it means you may experience a hard time selecting among them. The basic characteristic that you should look for is that they are without doubt an ethical search optimization company. Ethical means the company does not have to maneuver the results of search engine ranking and is not too forceful on their marketing endeavor.

Also be conscious of search engine optimization services that are distributing unsolicited mails. You may be receiving spam mails. Always have a skeptic attitude when it comes to the promises made by a certain firm. Choose those that are giving believable marketing statements. Keep in mind that being number one on search engine rankings is such an impossible idea especially when you are only starting out.

Be sure that you know how the search optimization service you will employ will tell you exactly how they are going to help you achieve your aim. Make them explain all the specific points about this concern. This is for the reason that a wrong move by the SEO company you hire might affect your status on a search engine. If they are doing unethical campaigns for you then you may be banned on a search engine forever.

You must also opt for an excellent search engine optimization service. This kind of companies usually all the job for you from helping you developing your site to submission into the top search engine to implementing evaluation to your site.

If you already have a search engine optimization service then you must still keep on tracking their performance. How can you do this? Download the Alexa Rating and Google PageRank toolbar on your computer. These tools will help you evaluate how your site was doing anytime that you want.

Ask you SEO for real time statistics

So that you can observe the traffic on your site by yourself. This will enable you to see who is going to your site, the search engine they use and the keyword they type in. Finally, tell the Seo company to send reports about your sites visibility. Included on this report is the percentage of the people who visited your site monthly, quarterly or even daily.

Thus, it is a must that you choose to employ a search engine optimization service that will qualify on the points that I place above. And always maintain an after-hire evaluation to them so that you will know if they are giving you the service that will equal your money's worth.

Google's sandbox is a relatively new filter that appeared to be put in place back in March of 2004. This happened after the widely publicized updates of Austin and Florida, and the implementation of what is known as the Austin update. If you are not sure what those are, there is no need to worry as those updates are now for the most part in the past.

The sandbox filter seems to affect nearly all new websites placing them on an initial "probation" status. The effect of this is that new websites may get into Google's SERP's (search engine results pages) relatively quickly and may even perform well for a couple of weeks. When the filter is applied to the new website it is referred to as being put in the "sandbox". The new website will still show in the result pages, but it will not rank well regardless of how much original, well optimized content and regardless of how many quality inbound links the site may have. The filter restrains new websites from having immediate success in the search engine result pages. Or in worse condition, if you rank well in all the other major search engines, but do not show up at all in Google's rankings, you have probably been sandboxed.

No webmaster will like the Google Sandbox. But, a smart webmaster will use the sandbox as an opportunity to build a website that Google simply cannot refuse.


If your website is sandboxed, here my tips to escape from there:

1. Change your website layout

2. Add your website content

3. Submit your articles (with your website name attached) to increase link popularity

Google still ranks websites in much the same way that they had in the past. Websites are judged on the quality of their inbound links and the quality of their content. Google will continue to change how they evaluate inbound links and content, but the basic elements of their rankings will remain the same.

Some opinions say that it takes 6-12 months to escape from Google Sandbox, while another opinions say it takes only a few weeks to escape from Google's sandbox. But, if you do nothing, your website may not be released from the Google Sandbox.

Finally, I want to say that the Google Sandbox is only intended to reduce search engine spam. It is not intended to hold people back from succeeding. Google is looking for websites that offer quality contents for us as Google's customers. Google still relies on the natural voting system that was first used to establish pagerank. So, keep positive thinking !

As a part of the fight for the quality of search results, the Google search engine started to penalize websites that use invalid site promotion techniques. The penalty applies to a specific webpage or at times to an entire website.

PageRank 0 - PR0 When a certain page is penalized, its PageRank decreases to 0. This is referred to by professionals as PR0, and I shall also refer to it so further below.

The main signal of a penalty is when a webpage, a group of pages or an entire website that had a positive PR in the past suddenly has a PR0 - this can happen as a result of modifications that were made by the site's owner to the webpages, or changes in Google's algorithm that is searching for invalid site promotion techniques.

In order to learn how to check a webpage's PR, please refer to our PageRank article.

How does Google discover invalid site promotion techniques? The search engines (allegedly) use three main methods to expose rebellious websites:

Automatic Flagging Google's robot searches for some of the evident promotion techniques that are invalid. When a robot encounters such an incident, it will "put up a red flag". User Reported Websites Search engines enable (and even encourage) users to report usage of invalid promotion techniques. If you encounter a website that uses this technique, you can report it to Google via a special page dedicated to reporting websites using invalid techniques (spam). Forums This technique may not be official, but it seems that the people from Google read site owners' forums, and when they stumble upon a site that does not play a fair game, they take action. Reporting a website that uses spam techniques: Google Spam Report:http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

How do you receive a pardon? The PR0 penalty is usually automatic, meaning that once the search engine recognizes use of invalid optimization techniques, it will activate the penalty without human intervention. Innocent webpages may be harmed this way, but this is the only way Google can deal with the number of pages that exist in its cache. However, an automatic penalty will last a fixed time (30 days), and when the problem is fixed, there is a good chance that the page will return to its previous status.

In cases of a manual penalty or a significant deviation from site promotion norms, it is possible that the penalty will apply for a long period of time, up to a permanent penalty. Even when the domain expires and someone else purchases it, he will discover that he can't appear in Google.

The meaning of PR0 penalty PR0 webpages are not completely removed from search results, but suffer a substantial harm to their placement in search results, which, in competitive fields, is the same as being deleted.

Why a PR0 penalty is applied There are many opinions on this subject because of the lack of information on behalf of Google on this subject. The only way to understand the way the penalty works is by examining the common features of all penalized pages.

Following are the main reasons that can result in PR0 that is not a penalty:

A new webpage Before you panic, it is quite possible that a page received a PR0 only because it was uploaded after the last PR update. Checking the domain without "www" If you perform a PR check of a page with the "www" removed from the domain's name (check "domain.com" instead of www.domain.com, then you might definitely see a PR0 for this page. There is a difference in Google's eyes between "www.domain.com/page.htm" and "domain.com/page.htm". A temporary Google malfunction This may also happen quite frequently, when Google does not return the PR fast enough, or can't return it all because of a technical problem, it will be displayed as PR0 on the toolbar. Dynamic Pages When pages are created dynamically, Google may treat them as new webpages, and give them a PR0 as a result. No links to the page The page is an "orphan": there are no links pointing to it. This can sometimes be a result of linking through Flash. There are several techniques that are considered as invalid site promotion techniques or spam as they are called professionally. Using these techniques may result in a PR0 penalty for a page or an entire website.

For additional information regarding invalid site promotion techniques, please refer to the Spam - Invalid Site Promotion Techniques article.

Does a link from a page with PR0 harm the target page? The answer is no. If this was the case, a war would have started on the Internet, with site owners linking to their competitors to damage them. In addition, a site owner has no control over his incoming links, only his outbound ones.

Links from websites with PR0 are neither harmful nor useful with regards to your page's PR calculation, but on the other hand, the page that links to you may have received a temporary PR0, therefore a link from that page may turn into a good investment in the future.

You should avoid linking from your site to PR0 pages: since you do have control over this type of action, it may result in a penalty.