SEO, marketing and programming

When the PageRank algo was first invented, it was almost perfect: it used the semantic structure of the web, counting links as votes. Google was a small company that nobody knew of, and nobody cared about.

But now, when Google gives many sites 50-70% of their traffic, the incentives to cheat the algos are bigger than ever. It is very much like physics: you cannot measure a system without changing its state. Same thing happened here: now, every effort is not spent on linking to useful sites, but linking to sites that you have an interest in linking to.

Pragramtic webmasters put rel=”nofollow” on all “useful” links (that are intended for visitors), and only leave some sold or links to their own pages without the nofollow property. This works short-term, but in the long term it will destroy the semantic structure and, as a result, Google will have to invent a new way of ranking websites. So in the long term, this strategy won’t work.

Footnote: this should not be interpreted in any way that I dislike the “nofollow” param or that I don’t use it myself. These are just my reflections=)

Check my contest page for The Four Required Words seo contest.

Here, you can see a chart over how different people are performin in this contest.

This contest is small, so I’m doing this more for fun than for profit.

I’ve done some interesting observations on the IDN & filename fix that Google has applied to its Swedish version.

Until recent, Google could not handle IDN properly. It showed up something like “%c4pple.se” instead of äpple.se. You can see an example here on MSN.

There are still problems with the Toolbar PageRank.

Anther interesting thing is that we now can confirm that google treats o=ö, a=ä, å in filenames. You can see this by searching for a phrase that should contain any of the letters ö, ä, å, but contains their correspondents in english, e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=sokmotoroptimering

A fynny side-effect of this is that if you search for a word that should not contain å, ä, ö; e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=sokmötöröptimering

UPDATE: I won’t work on this one. I just hope that my image will be grabbed by the Google Images engine, that’d be interesting.

The Four Required Words is a small seo contest, but I entered it since I want to test wheather a page can win with only (well, we’ll see) internal links. Nobody seem to take it very seriously, neither do I. Strange keywords, The Four Required Words, moahahahaha. I’d say fourth required word instead. Hahaha. You have to have a link to them, but at least they allow to put nofollow on it, unlike som other contests. For obvious reasons, I’ve done so.

You can see the current positions here: The Four Required Words Contest Positions

The Million Dollar Screenshot

Since there are prizes for image search and I’ve been interested in how the Google Images ranking algo works, here is my “The Four Required Words” image: