Its been an interesting couple of weeks for UK SEO’s as Google makes a couple of changes and announcements which keep them guessing about the best methods for better search engine positions.
Pagerank Sculpting Debate – Google came out with the news that around a year ago they changed the way pagerank was passed between pages. The original model was that a pagerank score (not necessarily the one shown in toolbar but the ture link score a page can pass) was split evenly between the links out from that page. So if a page had a link score of 10 and linked out to 5 pages it would pass a score of 2 to each of the links. Realising this SEO’s started to use the nofollow attribute to “sculpt” this pagerank to those pages it wished to page link score to. So they would nofollow the 3 links to pages they didn’t want to benefit, anf the 2 remaining would get passed a link score of 5 each. But Google are now saying that this tactic hasn’t worked for around a year and in the example explained above the 2 links would still only receive a link score of 2, and the other 8 would stay unused.
Queue a thousand SEO bloggers coming up with a new way of displaying links you do not want to be given credit (iframes? flash? or simply robots.txt?) and webmasters scampering to amend their current links. In truth, if this has been in place since last year, you are not going to see any new changes in your SEO efforts by leaving things alone. And given there is yet to be a definitive way to deal with this issue, it is probably best to leave things alone. Matt Cutts himself recommends not attempting to sculpt Pagerank and to leave it to flow freely within, and outside of your site read more here.
International Confusion and Bungee Results – Also in the last couple of weeks there has been a strange shift in the SERPs which has producing natural search results reminiscent of a bungee jumper with websites bouncing up and down the rankings on a daily, if not hourly basis, and strange occurrences of international sites appearing in .co.uk results. US, Australian, and even Finnish websites have been spotted in the google.co.uk SERPs causing confusion amongst users and SEOs alike. Andrew Heaps, Head of SEO at Latitude Group, puts the changes down to a push in trusted sites gone wrong, but there has been no official comment from Google. Whatever has changed, it seems to be in error, as there is no way these changes can be improving Google’s user experience. For now, SEOs are watching their results and waiting for them to settle down to see the real impact the changes have had on their rankings.
Have you seen major changes in positions? Think you know the changes and how best to use the to your advantage? Feel free to share with the rest of us!