PageRank is something that many within the search engine marketing and optimization industry are familiar with. PageRank reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages. Pages perceived as important receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear toward the top of the search results. 
 
Years ago, the “nofollow” attribute was introduced, which enabled webmasters the ability to tell search engines to not follow a specific link from a page.  This attribute essentially tells Google and other search engine spiders to ignore the link and not transfer any PageRank to the page it links to. This can even be used internally on websites to tell the search engines to not transfer PageRank to interior pages. This led to what is known as “PageRank sculpting” where webmasters started to manipulate how credit flows throughout their site.  With PageRank sculpting, webmasters could prevent losing valuable credit on links to unimportant pages and the credit that would have been given to those pages could be redistributed, providing the other links to more important page (those without the nofollow attribute) with more credit.  PageRank sculpting is done in theory to achieve higher rankings for internal pages of a website by not wasting credit on less important pages.

However in 2009, Google stated that using nofollow attributes will no longer allow you to redistribute credit.  Instead, if you use the nofollow attribute, let’s say on 5 links on your homepage, the credit for those 5 links will disappear. The credit that those 5 links would have received without the nofollow attribute will no longer be distributed to other links on this page. 

Since this is the case, it forces webmasters to think about the number and value of links they have on any given page.  If you have too many links on a page, and some of them are nofollowed, you’re essentially throwing away credit.  For search engines and users, you should ensure that the links you have, particularly on your homepage, are to valuable interior pages.  There may be times when you do want to include the nofollow attribute, such as for log-in pages, shopping cart pages, etc.  After all, there is no value in having these pages rank in the search results.  

Here is a link to a post on Matt Cutt’s perspective on the nofollow attribute and PageRank sculpting.  In general, it’s recommended to let PageRank flow throughout the site.  Focus on creating a site worthy of garnering quality links, and an architecture that is friendly for search engines and users.

For those who are not able to embark on a new website design this year as a New Year’s resolution mentioned in a previous post, there are other places where you can focus to keep your online marketing performance on track.  A great place to start when analyzing your marketing performance from previous years is your website’s analytics data.  If you weren’t tracking anything in 2009, then there is an easy New Years resolution for you!

If you have been tracking your efforts, what trends are you seeing?  Where has the majority of your traffic originated from: organic, paid, direct traffic or referring sites?  If you see that most of your traffic came through paid efforts, this might be a sign that shifting some of your focus to search engine optimization (SEO) to improve rankings may be valuable for you.  Over time, as you monitor your analytics, you may start to see an opportunity to pull back on the paid traffic and rely more heavily on organic traffic, which is free!

Within your analytics, continue to dig deeper beyond the source of the traffic to see the behavior of your website’s visitors.  What do visitors do when arriving at your site?  Do they simply leave after viewing only one page (also known as a bounce)?  In this case, look into where they are landing. There is a great report in Google Analytics called a Top Landing Pages report (particularly the Comparison view) which will enable you to have a quick and easy look at the landing pages that lead to a higher bounce rate than others. Or, perhaps you see many page views during visits, but very few conversions.  If so, think about the user experience and the calls to action throughout the site.  If you have an e-commerce site, perhaps it is the checkout process that is losing your visitors.

This year, strive to analyze your online marketing as a whole and source your analytics frequently. Within your analytics platform, it may be easy to look at a high level view of the traffic, but don’t ignore the detailed information available to you as well.  This can shed light into ways to reduce costs, such as by possibly making a shift from less paid traffic to more organic traffic.  Also use Google’s free tools, such as Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and Insights for Search to name a few.  These tools can help you to analyze your website’s data, perform tests to continue to make improvements, and identify search volumes and patterns over time that may be relevant to your website or industry.

There have been a lot of changes within the search industry lately.  One interesting change is that the Google is now incorporating real-time information within their search engine results pages. Google made this announcement earlier this month and these real-time results include tweets from Twitter and information from other sources such as Facebook, blogs, news articles, and more.

To see the real-time results within Google’s search results page, try conducting a search for a keyword that is popular, such as President Obama. Keep in mind that these live updates will not be displayed for every keyword that is searched. Below is an image of the scrolling area on the results page when I conducted a search for President Obama.  This scrolling area updates automatically as you view the page.

As you can imagine, there is way too much information circulating on the web and within social networks to include every bit of relevant information on the search engine results page. Therefore, Google states that they apply “its own measurements to those whose updates appear in real-time results. Retweets and the number of followers a person has factor into Google’s assessment of quality.” 

With this update, there are still a few questions. How useful is this information going to be for searchers?  When people conduct searches in Google, are they really looking for the latest news or conversations about that topic?  How accurate is the information displayed within this scrolling area on the page?  Will it encourage businesses to focus more heavily on online reputation management? How will this impact SEO and the race to get to the top of the page now that this scrolling box takes up some of that real estate on the page?

Here at MoreVisibility we’ve talked about the importance of incorporating social media into online marketing initiatives for quite some time now. With these recent updates, it is even more important than ever.