Axandra news archive: 23 May 2006

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• Test drive the new IBP and ARELIS version
• Recommended resources
• Previous articles

Many webmasters are still obsessed with the green PageRank bar in Google's toolbar. Last month, marketing expert Mike Grehan interviewed Google's Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts is a Google engineer who knows exactly how the Google ranking algorithm works. He confirmed that PageRank is not the only important factor for Google.

PageRank is not a big deal

Matt Cutts made a clear statement about PageRank in the interview: "There are over 100 factors in ranking. And PageRank is just one of them. It's an important factor, but it's by no means the be-all and end-all."

We've said it before in our newsletter: the green PR bar in Google's toolbar doesn't mean much. If you want to get good results with search engines, you should not get obsessed with that value.

What can you do to get your web site listed on Google if PageRank is not a big deal?

As Google's Matt Cutts explained in the interview, Google uses many factors to rank web pages. The problem is to find out which factors exactly influence the ranking of your web site.

IBP's Top 10 Optimizer analyzes many factors that can influence the ranking of your web pages. That allows you to find out which factors exactly you have to tweak and how you have to do it so that your web site can get top rankings on Google.

Google (and other major search engines) basically want two things:

• good web page content that can be crawled by search engines
• good inbound links from reputable web sites

If your web site has interesting content that can be crawled by search engines and good inbound links than it is difficult not to get high search engine rankings.

The interview confirmed once again that the comprehensive SEO approach we follow with IBP and ARELIS is the best way to get long term results results on search engines.

Successful search engine optimization is not about getting a single trick done. It's about working on all important factors that can influence your web site rankings. Our tools can help you to do this. You can listen to the entire audio interview here.

Google tops another search survey

"The ComScore report indicates that Google's market share rose from 36.5 percent in April 2005 to 42.7 percent in March 2006, while Yahoo fell from 30.7 percent in April last year to 28 percent in March 2006.

MSN also declined, with its market share falling from 16.1 percent in April 2005 to 13.2 percent in March."

Google Big Daddy update timeline

"I believe the crawl/index team certainly has enough machines to do its job, and we definitely aren’t dropping documents because we’re 'out of space'. The second point is that we continue to listen to webmaster feedback to improve our search."

Search driving 80 percent of Google's traffic

"The company’s search site, Google.com, gets almost 80 percent of all the visits, leaving no doubt that it remains the motor that powers the company’s business, despite Google’s growing assortment of online services."

MSN allows opting out of Open Directory listing descriptions for webmasters

"Even though these human-edited descriptions provide a lot of value, with human editing may come human error, bias, descriptions getting outdated, or the editor’s text may simply not suit the webmasters who want to be represented in their own way."

Search engine newslets

• Google, Yahoo! and MSN: property size-up.
• Google to distribute online video ads.
• Google has issues with the site: operator query.
• Google Base is now available in Germany and the UK.
• Kiwis use Google to search for sheep.
• The number of companies that are being hacked because their data can be found on Google is increasing.
• Google in Brazil may face criminal probe over Orkut.

Google leads in search but trails Yahoo in portal efforts

"Google has the name recognition and positive brand association needed to move aggressively into the portal space, but getting users to become loyalists and adopt a range of services from one provider is not an easy matter."

Europe is failing to exploit internet, says Google chief

"The European head of Google, the giant internet company, has warned that Europe still lags behind the US in exploiting the commercial power of the Internet."

Google users promised artificial intelligence

"A search engine that knows exactly what you are looking for, that can understand the question you are asking even better than you do, and find exactly the right information for you, instantly - that was the future predicted by Google yesterday."

We're currently developing the new generation of our web promotion tools ARELIS and IBP. You can be among the first to test the new generation.

The most complete search engine optimization tool is coming

Both ARELIS and IBP have been integrated into one user interface. IBP and ARELIS are still two independent programs but it is now much easier to work with both programs on the same web site.

In addition, the new Top 10 Inbound Link Optimizer tool will help you to get better search engine rankings.

This is one of the last beta versions before the final release

The new version is not 100% ready for the final release yet. The latest beta version is very stable but there might still be some problems.

Only if you're comfortable testing pre-release versions that are not intended for daily work, you should download the test version. We value your feedback on the preview version so that we can make the final release as powerful as possible.

IBP received "Outstanding - 5 out of 5" award

"IBP is the multi award winning web site promotion tool that helps you to get more revenue with high search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo and all other major search engines.

The suite of 10 professional website promotion tools includes a search engine submission tool, a search engine ranking checker, a top 10 optimizer and a keyword generator. IBP creates professional reports in PDF, HTML and Microsoft Word format."

• The effect of co-citation on your search engine rankings
• PageRank, TrustRank and your web site
• Does Google think that your web site is spam?
• Googlebot and Mediabot - Can you get in trouble?
• Do hackers hijack your search engine listings?
• New Google acquisition: can we expect a shift in Google's algorithm?
• Can duplicate content really influence your rankings?
• How to get links from .gov sites with high PageRank
• View all past issues...