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.

Google’s Webmaster Tools is a central location for webmasters to view and update diagnostic data concerning their websites in relation to the Google algorithm. What are some of its SEO benefits?

From an SEO perspective, Google’s Webmaster Tools has really pertinent information, such as “Top Search Queries” and “Links to your Site”. Top Search Queries” allows webmaster to analyze which search term or “keywords” are the most used on their site and which position in Google they are ranking for those keywords. “Links to your Site” lets you see the websites that are linking to your site. It even breaks down which pages these websites are linking to. This is invaluable to webmasters as this is the only way to get a comprehensive view of which sites are linking to you. Simply using the “Link:” command in Google only gives you a very limited report of a site’s backlinks due to Google’s stringent guidelines on privacy.

Google’s Webmaster Tools also facilitates your website’s crawlability. By using Webmaster Tools’ XML Sitemap Submission, you can submit an XML sitemap to help Google find the deeper level pages on your website. Webmaster Tools will also let you view errors in your robots.txt file, “Page Not Found” errors and even the last time the Google spider successfully accessed your homepage.

Personally, Google’s Webmaster Tools is one of the most useful SEO tools around and there are many reasons for using it.

A few weeks ago one of our SEO team members wrote a great blog post about how Google may soon be including web page load time as part of their ranking algorithm.  As mentioned in the blog post, Google has provided a site dedicated to providing information about improving a site’s speed: http://code.google.com/speed/

Just this week we are seeing that Google is making another step toward helping webmasters improve the speed of their websites.  In Google Webmaster Tools under Labs, there is now an experimental section called Site Performance.  This new addition to Webmaster tools shows webmasters on average how long it takes their pages to load, how that compares to other sites, and how the load time has changed over time through a trending graph.  An example of this graph is shown below.

Other details provided in this section are example pages from the website and the time that it takes those example pages to load as well as suggestions of how to optimize those pages based on the Page Speed tool. Within the Site Performance section, webmasters can also download the Page Speed tool to help optimize their site for improved speed, which ultimately leads to a better user experience.
Its important to note that this data is an average and the load time of a website’s pages can vary based on a user’s location and network conditions.

As Google is trying to make their search engine as fast as possible, it is critical that webmasters evaluate and pay attention to the time it takes pages to load, and this new Site Performance section makes it much easier to monitor.