What Is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a photo-sharing site, which is nothing new. We’ve had Photobucket for years, and of course Google’s own Picasa, and many others. While those have seen moderate success, Pinterest is still greatly surpassing them in popularity.

How Does It Work?

The way you share these photos is to post it up on these “pin boards” (like a cork board you would have at home, but digital). You theme the pin boards according to what images are in it. You may have a home decorating board, a recipe board, and a funny images board. You can have as many as you want and theme them whatever way you want. You can tag images you add or find around the site, and of course search tags to find more. All of the images provide a link back to the source.

Is It Useful For SEO?

Absolutely. As mentioned above, the images provide links back to the source. Not only are they do-follow links, but they can also be easily found and shared, spreading more links around to all of the boards different people have. Not to mention, people clicking through are obviously going to land on your site!

How To Best Utilize This Tool

As with any social media site, the trick is to not be spammy, and not be obnoxious. My big rule for SEO has always been that “content is king” and just like textual content, the images here are king, so they need to be quality, they need to be relevant, and you need to be engaging. Make boards related to your site (products, offers, etc) just like you would write blog posts about related things. Make sure your boards are properly organized. When you post your images, make sure you tag them appropriately, that’s a big part of how people will find them. As I said before, you also need to be engaging. That means following people who post related images, commenting on their images, and even re-pinning their images onto your own boards.

So, there you have it. Pinterest is your new SEO tool and if you follow my advice you should see a difference in just a matter of a week or two!

SOPA – Stop Online Piracy Act

SOPA would give copyright holders the power to take any web property to court that was deemed as “enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.” This included, but was not limited to: internet service providers (for allowing a user who was found infringing), web hosts (for hosting a website who was found infringing), search engines (for linking to websites who were found infringing), and any website who was in any way affiliated with a website found infringing. Thankfully, SOPA was dropped due to a massive online protest by pretty much everyone in the US.

PIPA – Protect IP Act

This bill said pretty much everything SOPA said, but included domain names into the mix. Luckily, PIPA was also dropped due to large amounts of pressure from the general public.

ACTA – Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

ACTA is the worst of the bunch because it is not only international, but many countries have already signed it. ACTA supports everything SOPA and PIPA support, but also branches out of the internet and into real world goods such as common fake purses, fake watches, etc. It also includes generic medicines. Which countries have already signed? The United States, the European Union (and 22 of its Member States), Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. This agreement is not in effect at the moment, but could be very soon if we don’t stop it.

What Does This Mean For SEO?

1. For the SEO in the business of helping clients, many clients will fall under the umbrella of infringement and thus will be taken down. No clients means no income. For the SEO who is only in business for themselves and their own websites: many of their websites won’t cut it and will also be taken down.
2. Keywords could be infringement. If you have a client (or website) that sells, for example, an iPad case, Apple can then point out you and/or your client for using the word “iPad”, and now that site is down. That also includes anytime you’re using it in a keyword, so now all of the places where you’ve used the keyword phrase “iPad case” are set to come down.
3. Nothing copy written can be on your sites or clients’ sites. That includes everything from the contents of your videos (background music, items in view of the camera, etc) to images, to especially content. These are all things that could have you and/or your client shut down in an instant.
4. Because of point number 2, many of the social networks or other properties used to link to your site (or client’s site) will be taken down.

As you can see, this is detrimental not only to business for anyone and EVERYONE on the internet, but it is detrimental to simple users as well. We’re all going to have our sites taken down if this passes.

Has Google awarded your site the coveted crown of high PageRank or have they sent you to SEO Hell with a PageRank of 0?

On February 6th, 2012 Google began updating their toolbar PageRank. Everytime Google updates the “little green bar”, the inter webs see a flurry of activity with overwhelming panic and/or joy. I like to call this “little green bar madness”.

As soon as the update occurs webmasters review their score to answer:

Have the last couple months of linkbuilding been worth it?

What is PageRank?

First of all, what is PageRank and where did it come from? PageRank is a sort of barometer for your page’s authority in Google’s eyes. A web page’s PageRank can score from 0 to 10. Only the biggest, oldest sites on the web achieve a score of 7 or higher. For most webmasters, the highest they will ever see their site could be a PR5 or a PR6. Very few are able to achieve a PR7 or above. PageRank helps Google sort through the billions of pages on the internet.

What should be Expected?

Many webmasters or site owners think that their site’s PageRank will continue to rise over time similar to how you expect or hope your site’s search engine rankings keep rising, however, this is not the case. Just because you went from a PR2 to a PR4 in two months doesn’t mean your site will go from a PR4 to a PR6 with the next update and then a PR6 to a PR7 and so on. Generally decent sites hover around a PR4 or PR5.

PageRank is NOT Linear

PageRank is not measured on a linear scale. If it were a linear scale, then what would be required to go from a PR3 to a PR4 would be the same as it takes to go from a PR5 to a PR6, but this is not the case. PageRank is measure on a logarithmic scale. The implication of this is that what it takes to go from a PR4 to a PR5 is much more difficult then what is required to go from a PR2 to a PR3. Each level is much more difficult to achieve than the last.

Low Correlation between Rankings

Many website owners are disillusioned when it comes to PageRank. They think that if they can get their PageRank to increase that so will their rankings and revenue. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz reports that when analyzing billions of pages on the web, there is a low correlation between search engine rankings and a site’s PageRank. He also reports that he believes PR is less than 5% of Google’s current algorithm. See what Rand has to say about PageRank by checking out the video below.

Watch Your Stats NOT Your PageRank

Regardless of your fascination with the little green bar and your current score, look to your web stats to set your mood. If you’re stats are trending up and to the right, then you should have nothing to worry about. If your stats are trending down then you may want to take a look at where your losing traffic from.

PageRank Checking Tools

Here are a couple resources I have found to useful.

http://prchecker.info/

• captcha required

http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/pagerank.html

• captcha required
• bulk option for checking multiple URLs

http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/pagerank-check.html

• catcha required
• bulk option for up to 5 URLs

Other Reading

Search Engine Roundtable

Webmaster World

If you want to gain a deeper understanding of PageRank try reading Google’s Original Paper on PageRank.

Want to know what really makes Google tick? Try Jerry West’s Google Best Practices Guide (paid) or Dan Thies’ SEO Fast Start Guide (free).

What happened with your sites’ PageRank? Are you even concerned about it at all? I would love to hear your comments.

It’s the end of an era… Yahoo! Site Explorer, the SEO’s go-to tool for discovering competitors backlinks has come down. YSE quickly gained popularity since Google’s link command was known for not being very accurate (Matt Cutts, head of the Google spam team said this was because “we didn’t have the storage space“) and only showing a few backlinks. Google’s link command would show you, 10 links or maybe 0, despite knowing that more were out there, however, YSE could report thousands. I personally have visited Yahoo! thousands of times just to use this tool. Now that has all changed.

Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance

This is all part of the rollout for the search alliance between Yahoo! and Microsoft’s. Yahoo! states that YSE has been migrated into Bing Webmaster Tools, however, you can only see backlinks for sites that you have verified as an owner. So any sites that you control, you can still get a somewhat accurate report of the number of backlinks, but you will not be able to spy on your competitors like you once use to be able to.

Reverse Engineering your Competition’s SEO

The YSE shutdown hasn’t really changed the game, but it has changed the players. A huge part of SEO is reverse engineering your competitors backlink profile. For example, lets say you want to rank for,”seo palm beach”. You go to Google and find the top ranking websites. For roughly the past 8 years, you would plug those sites into YSE and see all the juicy links that helped those websites get to the top. You would make a list of those links and then try to get your site on them as well.  YSE no longer works, but there are other solutions available.

What Now?

Now that YSE is gone, SEO’s will be flooding the other solutions. These are not new, they have been around for a couple years and are used by many  SEOs. Both have free versions with limited stats and paid versions with additional features and reporting.

SEO Moz’s Open Site Explorer

Majestic SEO’s Site Explorer

Conclusion

Thousands of webmasters and SEOs will no longer need to visit Yahoo! on a regular basis. The game hasn’t changed but the players have. Reverse engineering your competitor’s backlink profile lives on

What other solutions have you found?