You don’t come across them often, but sites with a PageRank of 10 certainly do exist..

http://www.seocompany.ca/pagerank/pr-10-pages.php

I was searching through my logs today saw a referrer link that brought a visitor to my page from Google. The interesting thing was when I clicked on the link to go to the Google search, I noticed a big yellow banner at the top, alerting me to the fact that Google is now providing a more personalized search.

New! Google finds the search results most relevant to you, based on your search history. Learn more.

This was news to me, but apparently it’s not that new at all. A quick search on “google personalized search” yields some detailed articles:

• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050628-073541
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/search-gets-personal.html 

Ok, so the Google blog made it clear that this is still a Beta project. If you have a Google Account, you can try out the personalized search here:

http://www.google.com/psearch 

This is a fantastic development for people doing searches but could really shake up the SEO industry (which is not necessarily a bad thing). If a large majority of users were to use the personalized search it would be incredibly difficult for SEO software to monitor the ranking of web sites, as it would be so hard to assess the impact the personalization is having on the SERPs and their content.

The great thing is this would force people to write more useful articles and produce better websites. Publishers would no longer focus on optimizing keywords and other SEO tricks.

I just realised today that Technorati’s blogfinder search by “Most Authority” is flawed. Why? Let’s do another Formula 1 test case (yes, you can see we love the F1 sites we run here! ).

Do a blogfinder search for Formula 1 in Technorati and sort by authority (http://www.technorati.com/blogs/formula+1?sort=authority) .What is the number one site? A site with only 6 posts on F1! In fact, you have to go all the way down to position 5 before you even find a site that is only about F1.

The only reason the other sites seem to have more authority is because they are linked to by more blogs than the others. Unfortunately, Technorati’s system does not compare to Google’s linkback PR calculations. Technorati’s is way too basic.

What is to stop the biggest blogs with hundreds (thousands?) of links from other blogs from simply adding more and more categories on topics they don’t even care about? They’ll get a no. 1 listing on virtually any category they choose..

It seems that one secret to getting a lot of traffic from Technorati and other blog directories is to not post your content all at once. Instead, spread your posts out during the day. Even better, you can experiment with what posting times bring you the most traffic from blog directories.

The logic behind this is that services like Technorati list their search results in a reverse chronological order. So if your blog pings them at the right time, the traffic will come as your site will be near the top.

Tomorrow Microsoft will reveal a new tablet PC to the world which they refer to as an Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC). Dubbed the Origami Project, it is a joint effort between Microsoft, Intel and various other manufacturers. There has been a large teaser campaign going on for the past few weeks with the Origami Project web site not revealing much information about the product at all.

We believe there are 3 main target areas with the device:

1. Portable media (movies, MP3s etc)
2. Wireless internet access
3. Electronic books

The device runs a special version of Windows XP like Windows CE. It is believed to have extremely low power consumption. The initial devices may struggle, but it is hoped future versions of the tablet will produce more than 12 hours of battery life.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve just finished making the hottest site on a niche topic - let’s say - paper clip and staple sculptures. You promote your site to the max, get hundreds of linkbacks. You have massive traffic and after a year expect to have reached PR10. Your site is now the biggest and best for its topic - it would only make sense that your sit with a PR of 10.

The end of your 1st year comes, and you find you only have PR4. What a disappointment! 

What’s more disappointing is the fact that PR4 may be the highest PR you can ever achieve for the topic you’re writing about. It seems like Google’s PR calculations do not take your topic or even your specific keywords into account as much as they should.

Let’s look at an example. Formula One is one of the most watched sports in the world. It comes in not far behind soccer (football). On an individual event basis it can even eclipse it.

The official site for Formula One is www.formula1.com. Not only should this site be considered the most important F1 site, you’d expect it gets a huge percentage of overall web traffic based on the popularity of F1 as a sport. Here’s the killer:

formula1.com only has a PR of 7!!

Read the rest of this entry »

The Fairfax publishing group continued the trend of Australia media companies pushing to acquire more of the web this week by purchasing New Zealand’s equivalent of eBay - Trade Me. eBay is present in NZ, but it doesn’t have the penetration that Trade Me has.

The sale of Trade Me netted it’s investors a cool $670 million. Trade Me founder Sam Morgan alone pocketed $220 million. At only 29 years of age his story is yet another inspirational tale. He started the web site in 1999 as a 23 year old university drop out. Funding was obtained from a small NZ venture capital company.

In the beginning, Morgan used to promote the site by driving his 1972 Holden around the streets of Wellington with Trade Me signage. Now the site enjoys over 2 million visitors per month and has over half a million items for sale (compared with eBay NZ’s ~15,000 items). Considering NZ only has a population of 4 million, the stats are amazing.

From a technical point of view, Trade Me looks impressive. The site is clean and fast. Navigating it here in Sydney is actually quicker than navigating eBay Australia’s site. Interestingly, while writing this article I decided to try trademe.com.au. It points to exactly the same site - trademe.co.nz. Perhaps they’re looking toward an assault on the Australian online auction market in the near future?

I was just reading a forum where someone stated .biz domains look unprofessional. I totally agree.

A counter argument was raised stating .biz has that reputation because it came after .com. I totally disagree.

Other tld names, IMHO, don’t have as bad a reputation as .biz domains. I believe the reason for this is because .biz domains are primarily used by people trying to cash in on keyword rich domain names to sell their latest e-book (or someone else’s e-book). They came into the web game late so are unable to pick up a good .com domain name, so they seek out .biz.

Then they put their crappy site up to sell their wares. You know the sites I’m talking about - white background, very plain, some text highlighted in yellow, some text in bold (like it’s supposed to be important LOL! ), some even in bold red! Don’t forget the most important design feature - make the page a mile long so you have to scroll all day through mega-hype. Get to the bottom of the page and you’ll be itching to find the secret of making $1 million using Adsense in only 18 minutes. But first you must pay $499.95 to find out the secrets from a so-called ‘expert’ in the field.

I’m sure .biz has a place somewhere, but all I know is that I haven’t bookmarked any .biz sites lately.

Sabeer Bhatia, the creator of Hotmail, was interviewed in 2004 on Triple J. You can hear the interview here:

http://www.abc.net.au/sydney/stories/s1240179.htm

It’s really worth a listen. I particularly love the part where Sabeer rejected a $140 million offer, then rejected a $350 million offer from Microsoft, and eventually pushed Bill Gates to $400 million.

A great metric for analysing your site’s earning capacity is Earnings Per Click (EPC). Calculating your EPC is simple:

EPC = Earnings / Clicks

For example, if you had a site earning $4/day on 10 clicks, your EPC would be $0.40.

While EPC fluctuates depending on what advertisers are willing to pay for a top spot, it is clear that the industry your site is in can have a major impact on EPC.

Analysing EPC can be a great way to determine which of your sites you should put energy into developing. 

So what industries pay the big bucks? Well, that part you’re going to have to work out yourself. It shouldn’t be too hard. One thing to keep in mind however is there are no hard and fast rules about what industry is best. Sometimes you’ll earn a lot more $$ focusing on a niche market.

The other problem is if you make a site of a certain genre purely because the industry has a high EPC you’re mad. You need to write about something you’re passionate about otherwise you’ll lose motivation. And please don’t go down the dreaded path of paying others to write mundane content for you - the net is full of enough rubbish already thank you!