I’ve been fairly scathing of toolbar PR in the past, suggesting that it’s fairly irrelevant when looking at a website.  It’s still not the be-all and end-all, but now that it’s been updated so frequently it removes one of the criticisms of PR which was that it was always hugely out of date.  It’s still out of date of course, but not AS out of date!

Some background: there are actually two PageRank values:

• Internal PR:  this is constantly changing as Google crawls the web.  It is used to calculate search results and rankings.  Nobody outside of Google sees this.
• Toolbar PR: this is a snapshot of Internal PR at a moment in time and this is what appears in the Google toolbar. This is what we see.

To illustrate the point, imagine that one of the top blogs linked to you in their latest post.  The latest post is always on the home page which usually (not always) has a higher PR than the rest of the website.  When Google crawls the site, it sees that it’s linked to you, assigns a certain amount of PR to you and calculates your internal PR.

Now, assume that Google decides to do a PR update from the latest results.  It will take the current internal PR, which includes the value of that link from the home page.

However, as soon as a couple of new posts appear on the blog, then your link will disappear from the home page down into the lower level pages and you won’t have a link from such a high PR page.  Google will see this almost immediately, recalculate the internal PR and your site will move down the rankings accordingly.  However, you will still have a high Toolbar PR until Google decides to update the toolbar PR, which could be months away.

If you decide to obtain a link based on toolbar PR then you’re going to get burned.

The converse is true as well.  You may find that a brand new blog post has been linked to from all sorts of high value places but because it’s new then it doesn’t have any toolbar PR.  However, it will have significant internal PR and when the next toolbar PR update comes round and it turns out to be a PR 5 or 6 link then you’ll be kicking yourself!

With the latest PR changes, you’re less likely to be burned because the updates have happened so frequently but my advice to you is to look at the context of the page that you would get the link from.  Ensure that it’s relevant to you and that it doesn’t have hundreds of links going to all sorts of random pages.  Also, take a look at the backlinks to the page and see what the value of those links are.  Are they likely to stay there for a while or do they look like they’ll disappear soon?  Finally, see if the page is caches in Google and if it is ranking in Google for the page title.  If it isn’t then the link is fairly worthless.

Only when you have a set of useful data can you make a useful calculation on the value of a link from a page. Toolbar PR can help you identify a potential link source but that’s only the start of finding a link, not the end!

Have I missed anything?  Put your thoughts in the comments below.

It gathers the two results together into what it calls an indented listing with the second page appearing just below the higher listing:

To get an indented listing, you need two pages that are both targeting the same keyword (so you’ll want them in the title tags and the body content) and also have them closely linked (such as linking to each other).  This works best if you already have a page that is ranking strongly for your chosen keyword and then you have another page that is linked from your strong page and which also links back to it.

There’s no 100% guaranteed way to get an indented listing for your chosen keyword.  Various factors include the strength of the competition, the authority of your own website, the quality of the pages you want to rank and the internal link structure of your own website.

But by having two similar pages then you’re on the right track.  Try experimenting with your links and your content and you should start to see some good results.

Today, we’re going to look at the navigational nightmare that is http://www.1001pens.com/ OK, it’s not as offensively bright as the last site we looked at but it’s still so bad that it’s going to scare away lots of potential customers.

Starting from the top it’s not too bad – some handy drop downs, a search function and a menu with some random links. Not a great start, but we’ve seen worse and if you’re looking for a particular pen then it might even work since you can avoid the rest of the home page.

However, below this it starts to get worse. First there’s a picture of a book which you’re invited to click on, even though you’ve no idea what it’s about. If you’ve come to buy a pen then why would you want to buy a book? Then you can chat with Max, who we must assume is the owner of the site. Then there are some pens but also a poster you can order. OK, that’s a bit weird – I don’t want a book or a poster, but we’ll press on…

Next, we have a welcome to the site and a huge wad of text stuck inside a textarea which is barely readable. That’s not good. Surely the welcome should be one of the first things you see? And the textarea is just a complete mess which shouldn’t be there at all.

After this, it all goes to pot a bit with various links, contact details, animations and more links. In fact, there are thousands of links – many of which lead to pages which say “Sorry, no Products this Collection”. If that’s the case then why have the links?

As for the rest of the home page layout, it just seems to be a totally random collection of pens. It’s a complete nightmare to use this site!

Also, if you click some of the links – perhaps to the pen nib gallery or to the waterman galleries then it’s impossible to get back to the home page unless you click the back button.

Now, the really sad thing about this site is just how good it could be. I have no idea who Max is but I’m pretty sure Max loves his pens and if you were to ask Max a question about a pen he could keep you there for hours with various facts and figures about this pen.

Also, if you search for ‘antique fountain pens’ then there’s Max’s site near the top of the Google rankings. I’m pretty sure that he gets a LOT of traffic but far less sales from his website because it’s such a soul destroying experience trying to use the site. Not only is it difficult to use but it makes Max look like a completely amateur, when I suspect the truth is actually the complete opposite. But if you look like an amateur then no one is going to want to buy from you.

In this case, what Max needs is to spend a little bit of money on getting a decent web designer into sort out a logical layout for the website and design a really professional looking site. I’m certain that Max would make his money back very quickly through increased sales from his website.

This is a classic example of a great business let down by a poor website. Max probably felt that he could save some money by doing the website himself. In fact, he’d make far more money if he’d got it done properly in the first place.

Have you seen any Truly Dreadful Websites? Post them in the comments and I’ll take a look.

Spammers beware though, because I’ll be deleting any comments stashed full with links, with spammy names or anything that just doesn’t quite smell right!  So if you want a nice link from this blog then you’d better bring something fun to the party like, oh, I don’t know, perhaps some coversation skills or maybe something to contribute to the conversation.

Radical isn’t it!?

I’ve been very generous and set the number of posts required to 3 before you’re trusted enough to get the link.  But I might up it if I find that it’s too low.

Are you planning on doing the same with your blog?  Let me know in the comments!

For most people, this doesn’t matter at all but for those of us that are SEOs or those of us that have a blog, it matters a reasonable amount.

First, a bit of history.  the nofollow attribute was added so that you could tell Google that a link from your website wasn’t to be followed by their spider.  So if someone paid you for an advert that linked to their site, or if you linked to a dodgy website for some reason then you could tell Google to ignore it.

Nofollow was also used by SEOs to carry out what is known as “PageRank Sculpting”.  Essentially, every page on a website has a certain amount of juice.  The more juice you have, the higher your ranking for certain searches.

You gather juice by having websites link to you and you pass juice to other people by linking to them  The amount of juice you have depends on what websites are linking to you and how much juice they are passing to you. If the BBC links to you then they may be giving you 10 units of juice because they are a popular site whereas if your mate’s dog site links to you it may only pass 1 unit of juice.

Logically, the less you link out then the more juice you hoard and the higher your rankings for that page.  It’s not actually that simple, since Google doesn’t like it if you don’t link out at all, but we’ll keep it simple!

What often happened however was that people would spam blogs by leaving hundreds of useless, innane comments just so they could get a link back to their site.  Nofollow fixed that since you could set your blog so that any comments are nofollowed. That way you would save your link juice and not risk linking to any dodgy areas either.

It was a simple and elegant solution.

But with this new change, there are two major impacts.

1 – The juice that you thought you were hoarding by nofollowing a link is now just evaporating into nothing. If you have nofollowed lots of unimportant pages on your website (such as the terms and condition pages) then you’re no longer saving that juice – it’s just disappearing.

2 - If you have a blog, every comment on every page is causing that page to lose juice that enables it to rank for various search terms.

Most SEOs are up in arms about point (1) because all of the effort they spent PageRank sculpting now has to be removed and their site architecture reworked.  This won’t affect most people.  But what WILL affect most people is the use of n in blogs.

The simplest way to fix this is to switch off comments, but that’s a pretty unsatisfactory solution and doesn’t encourage any conversations on your blog.

This is how it works: if you comment X number of times then you won’t get a link at all.  But the more trusted you are and the more comments you have approved, the more trust you gain.  Once you’ve gained the trust of the blog owner (by giving useful, insightful comments) then every comment you write will have a nice dofollow link which will actually pass juice to your website.

It’s an elegant solution and the first decent thing to come out of the nofollow changes.  I actually think it’ll become the norm for blog commenting in the future.

I’ll be installing the plugin over the next day or so and then the MMD will become a dofollow blog for those loyal followers!  I recommend you do the same.

You can pick up the plugin here. It’s still in beta so fire any comments back to Shaun.

Hashtags are words that you paste onto the end of your tweets to add to a larger conversation.  The way it works is that people will use Twitter Search to see what people are saying about a particular event.  If you want to join the conversation then you use an appropriate hash tag.

A popular term at the moment is Wimbledon:

“I hope Andy Murray wins today. #wimbledon”

Lately, spammers have been using hash tags to promote their services.

“Get your ring tones here: http://whatever #wimbledon”

So people searching for the latest news on Wimbledon (and there are a lot) are also getting these spammy messages as well.  It’s the equivalent of pasting the word Britney Spears all over your website to try to attract more traffic.  That was something that people used to do to game Google back in the 90s and although it’s crude, it works enough to attract people, assuming you don’t care about your brand.

Habitat, in a moment of madness, decided to use this technique to attract more traffic by using tags about Apple, iPhone and in one instance, the situation in Iran to promote a new database.

It’s a great example of how NOT to use Twitter and how making a seemingly tiny mistake can have huge consequences on your brand.  The backlash has been swift and loud.  People hated the fact that a premium brand was resorting to such low techniques.

Sensibly, Habitat have swiftly apologised and fired the person responsible (an intern).

The story will live with them though.  3 years ago, BMW were kicked out of the search results for trying to game Google and people still refer back to it today.  Habitat will now be known throughout the tech world as the company that made an amateur attempt to spam Twitter.

I remember the Chairman where I used to work once told us that any one of us could sink the company if we wanted to.  I didn’t believe him at the time but this is an example of just how it can be done (and in fact, a year or so after I left, the company got into major high-profile trouble after a junior consultant lost some restricted government data!).

So, lessons learned today?

Your brand is one of the most valuable things you have.  It takes years to build it up and you can lose it in an instance. Don’t trust it to an inexperienced intern!

The reason that affiliate programmes work so well is because of the power of a personal recommendation.   If you receive a cold call offering you a service then you are naturally extremely wary.  But if a good friend or a business partner that you trust recommends the same service then you know that you can trust that service.

It was a pretty timely conversation because just a few days ago we launched our own affiliate programme for MMD.

It’s very simple.  If you recommend MMD to any of your clients, associates, partners or friends and they buy anything from us, whether it’s a new website design our any of our SEO services,  then you will get a whole 10% of the total sale value.

For example, if you recommend us to one of your clients, perhaps a medium sized business, and they buy one of our professional, search engine optimised websites for £10,000 then we will send a cheque, made out to you personally, for £1000 ($1600)!

Each of our affiliate partners is given a unique website address to pass on when they are recommending us.  So even if your associate forgets to tell us that you recommended us, we can still see that they came via you from the unique website address that they used.

And what’s more is that we store that from the first time they come to the website. So even if they wait 6 months before they buy something from us, we’ll still know that it was you that recommended them and you’ll still get your 10% – even if you haven’t spoken to them for half a year!

We understand the power of a recommendation and that’s why we’re willing to pay thousands of pounds to have your recommendation.

To register with the MMD affiliate programme and to get your own unique URL, visit our affiliate page here.

The fact is that there are designs that people think are fantastic but in fact, they are truly awful.  And what better way to spend our time than to find them and make fun of them?

So, for the first an in occasional series, let’s look at some Truly Dreadful Websites.

First up is: http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/

OK, where to start with this one.

This website wants to kill you.  Seriously!

Firstly, you get an epilepsy inducing background that needs a serious health warning.  It that doesn’t get you, then the streaming music will do.  That awful repetitive song (naturally, you can’t stop it) causes your heart rate to increase until the sweet release of a heart attack induced death makes the music finally stop.

And what else do we have.  A cat running along the bottom – well, what website doesn’t have that?  Plus a bird flying around, perhaps trying to escape from the cat?  And finally, as a sort of cherry on top, there’s an image of a ladder with a paint pot and two concrete Venetian-style arches.  Genius.

But wait, what else – is it trying to load an Active-X control?  No, by some clever coding that frankly puts the rest of the site to shame, they’ve created a virus warning to show that your actual soul is under attack but that Internet Explorer has detected that and can save you.

That’s not something that they’ve publicised in IE 8 is it?

And now, over to our official adjudicator for the final, scientifically calculated, scores:

Score: (on a scale of 1 being unoffensive and 10 being truly offensive)

Use of colour: 8/10.  Good effort – my eyes are still hurting

Useless tacky bits: 7/10. Points awarded for the creative use of the cat, ladder, Venetian arches and the bird

Innovation: 8/10. The ActiveX warning is genius

Usability: 2/10. Disappointing – all the links seemed to work and it’s got a pretty easy navigation system

Annoyance factor: 9/10. The music and the colour both require a health warning

OVERALL: 8/10

So, a pretty good showing from this website.  They did a pretty good job on getting everything wrong except the usability, although the fact you can barely see it due to the background deserves an honourary mention.

However, there are plenty more websites out there that are ready to knock this one off its perch so stay tuned for part 2 – coming soon!

However, having been very active on Twitter for over a year now, I’ve built up a list of people who use Twitter to hand out solid SEO advice (amongth other things) and I’d definitely recommend following everyone listed below (in no particular order!).  I could add a ton more, but this is a pretty good list to get started with.

http://twitter.com/mattuk

http://twitter.com/kevgibbo

http://twitter.com/willcritchlow

http://twitter.com/RobOusbey

http://twitter.com/AndrewGirdwood

http://twitter.com/patrickaltoft

http://twitter.com/AndyBeard

http://twitter.com/onreact_com

http://twitter.com/NorthSouthMedia

http://twitter.com/mattmcgee

Have I missed anyone?  Guys like Matt Cutts post the odd SEO tip but not too often so he didn’t make the cut (pardon the (totally intended) pun!).  Let me know in the comments!

At the moment it’s the fifth most popular article on the BBC news site and you can be sure that it’ll be picked up in

hundreds of other websites, tweeted about, covered in many social media websites and generally talked about all over the Internet.  It’ll probably be covered hardest in the local media since it’s been so heavily featured nationally.

What all of this coverage adds up to is tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of publicity.  And all they had to do was to get a cute duck, a few photos and a few quotes.  Simple!

Whether the restaurant went out to get this result with the duck or not, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure they’ll be delighted with the results and their bookings will be well up for the summer.  It’s a brilliant example of how simple viral marketing can be.

Maybe I should change our company name to Cute Kitten SEO – every new client gets a cute kitten and a ball of string.  All I need to do is write a press release, including some cute pictures with happy clients and their kittens, then sit back and enjoy the publicity.  Then I can get a second wave when I get some animal rights protestors to attack our offices demanding that we stop exploiting kittens.  Genius!

How about you? What are your ideas for using cute animals for publicity?