Mining for PageRank

Google’s Toolbar PageRank, the value that you can obtain by surfing websites while the Google Toolbar is installed, has been available via a number of websites for years, ever since someone figured out how to reverse engineer the protocol that the Toolbar uses to talk to Google’s datacenters to obtain the value. Google appears to have been fairly tolerant of tools that obtain this data over the years (otherwise many of them would have been banned, or they would have changed the protocol frequently, etc.). This tolerance sometimes makes me suspect that Toolbar PageRank is a bit of a purposeful red herring, and ranking is perhaps all about anchor text instead, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The most popular tool for checking individual PageRank values is probably Read on »

Let’s say you were stranded on a desert island with no landing strip and surrounded by terrible rocks and breakers such that no boat would be willing to rescue you – without even coconuts to sustain you.  But in the midst of this you somehow had an internet connection, so you could throw together a quick lead-gen business, and then through PayPal you could transfer money to some shipping company who would then drop food, Dr. Pepper, and other essentials down onto you via parachute in exchange for your earnings. Read on »

There are a ton of great free tools out there, but there comes a point where you need to actually shell out a little money for tools if you’d like to accomplish some substantial results from an SEO standpoint.  If you’re an in-house SEO doing it all, you’ll  need tools for the six major pieces of SEO – Keyword Research, Architecture Analysis, Performance Tracking, Content Optimization, Linking Analysis, and (optionally) Monetization.  For Monetization, Google AdSense is pretty hard to beat, at least if you have under 500,000 page views, and the AdWords Keyword tool does a great job on the Keyword Research front, so in this posting we’ll focus on the other four areas.

The following tools are great values and add up to well under $100.00 a month Read on »

Students who study Latin commonly translate some of Caesar’s account of “The Gallic Wars”, where he begins by saying “All of Gaul [now France] is divided into three parts.” The three parts he named were Acquitania, Belgium, and “those who call themselves Celts or Gauls”. Yes, I know that last part wasn’t really a “part”, it was “people who call themselves something”. Clearly Caesar was a better general than he was a writer.

Similarly however, Caesar may just as well have said “all of SEO is divided into three parts: Content, Architecture, Read on »