CNN a PR 10 now:

After a long stay in Pagerank 9, CNN has finally got a full Pagerank 10 from Google. We have the most updated list of Pagerank 10 sites available in internet now http://www.searchenginegenie.com/pagerank-10-sites.htm . CNN was PR 10 before a year now they retained their PR 10. Though pagerank is just a number it’s a ultimate symbol of quality in Google’s point of view. There is just a handful list of sites with Pagerank 10 and CNN is one among them. Also Adobe flash player page and acrobat page got pagerank 10 which is again good news.

Pagerank obsession had been in existence for more than 8 years. From the day Google came into existence pagerank fever grabbed many search engine lovers and followers.

Does Protected Whois affect Google rankings?

Many of us prefer to protect our whois data to avoid spammers and scammers getting our email addresses for potential abuse. We protect our privacy on some of our sites though we don’t do it on our company website. Many of us know Google uses whois data in for search engine rankings. They primarily use this to avoid spammers capturing expired domains and using the backlink power of those domains and use it for their own website.

This Google patent already describes Google’s usage of whois for ranking purposes.

(http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=

HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=

1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20050071741&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741 )

Some extra from that Google patent:
1. A geographic information system (GIS) comprising information about a plurality of geospatial entities and configured to prioritize the geospatial entities according to a ranking mechanism.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the ranking mechanism uses data about a meta attribute of a geospatial entity to determine the geospatial entity’s priority.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises one of: quality of information available about the geospatial entity, an attribute of a description of the geospatial entity, and an attribute of a definition of the geospatial entity.

4. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises an indicator of the geospatial entity’s popularity.

5. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises one of: an age attribute, a stature attribute, and an importance attribute.

6. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises a relationship of a geospatial entity to its place in a hierarchy of geospatial entities.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein an entity of the plurality of entities comprises a collection of geospatial objects and wherein the priority of the entity is determined responsive to a characteristic of the collection of geospatial objects.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein an entity of the plurality of entities comprises a geospatial entity defined in an on-line forum and wherein the ranking mechanism uses data generated in the on-line forum to determine the rank of the geospatial entity.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the ranking mechanism uses data harvested from a website on the internet about a geospatial entity to determine the geospatial entity’s priority.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein the ranking mechanism determines a geospatial entity’s priority from a combination of weighted data from a plurality of meta attributes of the geospatial entity.

11. A computer-implemented method for ranking geospatial entities, the method comprising: receiving geospatial entity data; evaluating attributes of geospatial entities included in the received geospatial entity data; ranking the geospatial entities based on the evaluation; and storing the ranked geospatial entity data.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein the geospatial entity data comprises data generated in a community forum.

13. The method of claim 11, wherein the geospatial entity data comprises data associated with a specific user and further comprising using the ranked geospatial entity data to generate a map for the specific user.

14. The method of claim 11, further comprising selecting geospatial entities for a geographical display based on the rankings of the geospatial entities.

15. The method of claim 11, further comprising providing the ranked geospatial entity data to a map system configured to generate a map that includes ranked geospatial entities and unranked geospatial entities.

16. The method of claim 11, further comprising selecting geospatial entities to include in navigation instructions based on rankings of the geospatial entities.

17. The method of claim 11, further comprising selecting a geospatial entity to associate with an advertising term based on the geospatial entity’s ranking.

18. The method of claim 11, further comprising providing the ranked geospatial entity data to an application for generating a search result based on the ranked geospatial entity data.

19. The method of claim 11, wherein evaluating is performed responsive to user instructions for providing personalized geospatial entity rankings.

20. The method of claim 19, wherein the user instructions comprise a weighting to be applied to an attribute of a geospatial entity identified in the geospatial entity data.

21. A system for ranking geospatial entities, the system comprising: an interface for receiving ranking data about a plurality of geospatial entities; an entity ranking module for generating place ranks for geospatial entities according to a ranking mechanism based on the ranking data; and a database for storing ranked entity data generated by the entity ranking module.

22. The system of claim 21, wherein the interface is configured to provide the ranked entity data to a requesting application.

23. The system of claim 21, wherein the entity ranking module is configured to evaluate a plurality of diverse attributes to determine a total score for a geospatial entity.

24. The system of claim 21, wherein the entity ranking module is configured to organize ranked entity data into placemark layers.

25. The system of claim 24, wherein each placemark layer corresponds to at least one of: a level of detail, a density, an altitude, and an entity category.

26. The system of claim 21, wherein the requesting application is a map server system configured to use the ranked entity data to generate a map including entities selected on the basis of place ranks.

27. The system of claim 26, wherein the entity ranking module is hosted on the map server system.

28. An entity ranking module hosted on a client device, the module for generating rankings for a plurality of geospatial entities and the module comprising: an interface for receiving entity data that defines a plurality of geospatial entities and ranking data that describes the plurality of geospatial entities; and a ranking engine for generating rankings for the geospatial entities, wherein the rankings are used to select which of the geospatial items to include in a map to be displayed on the client device.

29. The module of claim 28, further comprising a memory for storing data about a user of the client device and wherein the ranking engine is configured to apply a ranking mechanism responsive to the user data.

30. The module of claim 29, wherein the user data comprises user preferences about the relative weightings of attributes evaluated by the ranking engine.

31. The module of claim 29, wherein the user data comprises a user defined geospatial entity.

32. The module of claim 29, wherein the user data comprises an indication of a user’s interest in a geospatial entity and wherein the ranking mechanism assigns a rankings premium to the geospatial entity based on the user’s interest.
What I am trying to say is you need to be careful when changing whois info or trying to suddenly protect your privacy by hiding your whois data. If there is sudden change you can expect some sort of problem but if done correctly I am sure you wont have any problem with whois privacy protection.

Mini sitelinks a copycat idea from yahoo and MSN

Google has now introduced / testing mini site links. Sitelinks are links that are below a website which is felt authority for a particular keyword. If you search for your domain name you can see sitelinks in Google results. Now Google has copied the idea MSN and yahoo had been using for a long time. They are integrating site links inside the snippets displayed.

Check here:

Google has copied this idea from Yahoo and MSN. Internet is fully of copy cats and Google is no exception I feel.

Signature in forum profile – Is it a sort of spam?

Getting backlinks from forum signatures is in existence from the day forums came into existence and had the feature to have backlinks. Is it still a good strategy I fear no. Forums are meant for quality discussions getting solutions for problems that you cannot find anywhere else in internet. Using such a wonderful resource for the same of spamming the search engines for backlinks is not a good idea.

I am personally not against it but if you see forums like digital point forums they allow forum signatures in exchange for minimum amount of postings and this actually helps the spammers more. I have seen many just start useless repeat threads or one do one line posts just to create an extra page with backlink. Digital point forum is a typical example of forum spamming most people who visit there are lacking of any SEO knowledge and this leads them to wrong assumptions on forum signatures.

There are discussions here just to know what keyword to use in forum signature, which page to link to, whether multiple pages from same sites can be linked, Is text required besides anchor text etc. I feel all these are just waste of time people can rather spend their time usefully than spamming forums for signature links. I request leave the forums alone they are very useful places for getting quality information.

Webmaster claims in webmasterworld yahoo directory listing stays free

Some webmasters have noticed their sites not removed even after 3 years unpaid. When first they made the inclusion they paid for the listing later they never renewed but it continued to remain in yahoo directory for free. I am sure this is great for everyone desperate to get into yahoo directory. For a fee of 300$ you can get a potential lifetime free listing.

Here are a few tips for evaluating a Yahoo directory listing:

1. Do a Y! directory search first to find the most appropriate category for your listing. Don’t choose the one you want because of PR or how high up it is, because the editor will probably place your site in the most appropriate category.

2. Ask yourself – how many other sites are listed in this category? Is my link likely to be buried on Page 2 or 3, or is it more likely to be near the top of page 1? Does the category itself have any Google search rankings for keywords relevant to your site? If so you may be able to get traffic from it.

3. From an SEO perspective, does the category have PageRank? Usually top tier categories have some decent PageRank, but as you go down deeper into the directory they don’t. Number of outgoing links in a category is an issue here too. If you’re likely to be buried on the 2nd or 3rd category page there will be less value.

4. From an SEO perspective relevance is important – how relevant is this directory category to my keywords?

5. Trust factors – is that category linking out to other good sites, or linking out to some expired domains or bad neighborhoods? Y! directory is one of the oldest most trusted web directories so there is usually some trust value associated with a link from here.

So as you can see, there are some instances where a Y! directory link will be valuable and others where it won’t, it just depends on your niche.

Does Googlebot crawl videos:

Recently I have noticed surge in videos from YouTube ranking for competitive phrases. If you see YouTube page all you see is a video without proper text, few comments shown and all other are just junk data. So here are my questions?

1. How a video ranks on top of Google results when it doesn’t have any proper optimization done or it just has keywords in title.

2. How does Google determine the content of a video? Does it have a program that somehow analyzes the video and evaluates its content, even when there are no spoken or written words, as in this case. Or does a Google employee actually watch the video and personally evaluate its content?,

Doing a bit of more searches I feel Google will be seeing the popularity of the video, real backlinks coming to the video, no of instances the video has been embedded etc.

Google can also see the comments and valuate the quality of the video some videos attract 1000s of comments so I feel Google will have ability to crawl all the comments though many contents are hidden.

Also the quality of the domain itself matters youtube.com is PR 9 domain which signals very high level importance and popularity in Google’s eyes. You can expect pages under youtube.com to rank because of the quality of YouTube domain.

Video views can also signal Google that the video is important.

In fact only Google knows the algorithm behind ranking YouTube videos. I will leave it to them.

Removing advertising or not advertising will show credibility:

Advertising on a new site is self-defeating. Shouldn’t you be highlighting the quality of the content to show why your site is linkworthy? Removing ads shifts the focus to your content and why someone should link to the site.

In my experience it helps the link building process to remove advertising from a new site because webmasters like to link to quality information that is free. A lack of advertising presents a more positive face because some people tend to overlook the high quality of the content because of the ads, not even give the content a chance. Leaving out the ads puts your content front and center, there’s nothing to distract from it. Even Google didn’t have advertising when it first started.

New sites with advertising are a turnoff

I receive many requests to link to new sites. Number one reason I’ll decline is advertising. It’s poison. Advertising sends the message that the reason this person wants my link is so they can make a buck off my traffic. Why should I link to that?

What is the point of trying to monetize a new site with a trickle of traffic? Advertising revenue depends on traffic. Shouldn’t you focus on building traffic first then monetizing the site after it’s acquired?

Works for older sites with low traffic

Sites that have been around awhile but aren’t performing well should be considered candidates for removal of advertising. What you have to gain long term may outweigh what little earnings you’ll lose while you focus on building traffic to the site.
Works on established sites, too

Even established sites can benefit from temporarily removing advertising. If a sub-section is not performing well because of a lack of links/traffic, you may want to consider temporarily removing advertising in order to boost the success rate of your link building effort.

Personally I like sites which are ad-free, if you want to have a site link worthy don’t show your visitors that you are madly money minded. Looking to always make money through advertising will spoil the trend to attract backlinks to your website. If you want quality links you need to back off on strong advertising on your website.

Pagerank update – April 2009

Google is updating its toolbar pagerank data, its confirmed and we have PR data for almost all of our websites changed. You can check your altered pagerank here:

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/future-pagerank-checking.html

Wikipedia wins on the death of Microsoft Encarta:

Encarta encyclopedia the largest and most used before Wikipedia came into existence is now laid to rest. Microsoft had decided to put Encarta to rest after a long and exhausting battle with Wikipedia.

We can call this the death of one monster and the rise of another. According to MSN Encarta website:

“Encarta Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009. We understand that Encarta users may have questions regarding this announcement so we have prepared this list of questions and answers below. Please keep reading if you would like more information about these changes to Encarta.

Why are these Encarta Web sites and software products being discontinued?
Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.

Microsoft’s vision is that everyone around the world needs to have access to quality education, and we believe that we can use what we’ve learned and assets we’ve accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions. In doing so, we feel strongly that we are making the right investments that will help make our vision a reality.

http://encarta.msn.com/guide_page_FAQ/FAQ.html

I remember my school days when I used to run around to get a copy of Encarta, my cousin gifted an encyclopedia book to me and I still have it. We never had a great resource like Wikipedia. Today Wikipedia is the most dominant resource on the website. Its one of the most used website today and the content quality is great. Also big difference between Encarta and Wikipedia is the commercial option. Wikipedia is totally free but you need to subscribe for Encarta encyclopedia. I am happy that encyclopedia is laid to rest. There is no way it’s going to compete with Wikipedia and win the race.

Google introduces broader keyword suggestions and longer snippets:

Google on 24th march released a new technology that can better understand concepts and associations related to the search done by end users, this advancement will help provide more related keyword suggestions on top and bottom of the search result pages.
Example, if you search for [principles of physics], Google algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Longer snippets in Google results page:

Now Google in offering longer snippets for longer queries. A snippet is the dark blue title and is followed by few lines of text which was previously indexed from your website. Below are a couple of examples.

Suppose you were looking for information about Earth’s rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth’s rotation axis tilt and distance from sun]. A normal-length snippet wouldn’t be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics. In addition, the extra line of snippets for the third result shows the word “sun” in context, suggesting that the page doesn’t talk about Earth’s distance from the sun: