I remember learning in the past that Google updates PageRank three or four times per year, and it being the beginning of July, I would expect them to be doing another PR update soon. We are halfway through 2010, after all.

If anyone knows any information about the next time Google will be rolling a PR update, then please comment below, as I am highly looking forward to finding out my latest PageRank status for dozens of pages across all of my websites.

It would be really nice to finally achieve a PR3 for the home page of this domain name, but I would also be more than happy to see some of my sub-pages receive a PR1.

As things currently stand, only the home page of this site has a PageRank greater than zero, which is depressing, to say the least. I do, however, have many pages at PR0, while at the same time boasting a much higher load of pages with a PR N/A, which is also disappointing.

I’ve done a lot of work on this blog since Google’s latest update, adding a ton of new content. In addition to that, I’ve also added quite the abundance of source code enhancements to help Googlebot find the information it needs to appropriately rank me on the search engine results pages.

I’ll be sure to update this entry with any news that surfaces in the coming weeks. Hopefully Google won’t keep us eager web developers waiting too much longer.

Related posts:

1. Google’s PageRank Update
2. Aiming For PageRank 1 :: My Insight Into Google’s Algorithm
3. The Importance of Google PageRank

It takes a lot of time and patience, and maybe even a bit of luck, to get your website indexed exactly how you like it. Having extra pages show up in Google’s search results can cause your website to lose relevance. Therefore, you want to ensure that every single page that Google lists (upon performing the site command with your domain name) is relevant to Internet users in some way or another.

Every month or so I will query Google for a list of pages indexed on my website and go through them, one by one. From start to finish, I will slowly compile a list of pages until I have completed the round. In the end, I can use the list of pages to discover what modifications I need to make to my website to better optimize things for search engine users.

Remember, it may take several months for the changes you make to your website to be completely crawled by Google and translated into better search results.

This is important! Realize that blocking crawler access to a page using the robots.txt file will NOT prevent those pages from being listed on Google’s search results. Placing a disallow line in your robots file will only tell Googlebot not to crawl said page; it will not stop Google from indexing that page. In fact, Googlebot will still transfer PageRank to a blocked page, so you are damaging your website if your attempt to remove an indexed page results in just blocking it from being crawled.

So how do you remove an indexed page from Google? Simple. Place the following meta tag in the head of the page’s source code, and the next time Google crawls your page it will be completely removed from the directory.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

The “noindex” parameter does exactly what you’d think it does; Google will no longer place that page in it’s search results. The “follow” parameter will tell Google to still use this page for PageRank purposes. Google will still take a look at all the links on the page and have the crawler continue it’s path, rather than stopping dead in it’s tracks. Thus, it’s usually a good idea to keep the follow attribute in the meta tag as well, unless you truly don’t want Google to have anything to do with that page, which is rarely the case.

I should also mention that this meta tag will be completely ignored if you continue to have the disallow command in your robots.txt file. If you blocked Google’s access to that page through your robots file, it will not be able to read the meta tags you set in place, so it’s a good idea to double-check just in case.

Related posts:

1. How to Find Pages that Google has Indexed
2. What Does the Canonical Meta Tag Do? | link rel=”canonical”, huh?
3. Optimize Your Blog – Simple Ways to Increase Value in Your Content

Also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, backlinks are the key to success when trying to increase traffic to your website. To put it simply, a backlink is a hyperlink from an external website that points to yours. The more pages on the Internet that link to your website, the better. It may seem like I’m stating the obvious, but there’s more to it than the simple fact that more links to your site means more people clicking those links. There is a lot more value in a single backlink than you might think.

Take a look at my article on Google PageRank if you aren’t already familiar with it’s role in determining search results. In short, PageRank (PR) is a number that gets assigned to each page on the Internet to represent it’s importance. When Google calculates this value, it finds all incoming links and takes a “share” of the PR from those pages and gives it to the page linked to.

Take this, for example:

This is a small-scale depiction of how PageRank is obtained. As you can see, page A contains links to and from pages B and C, while pages B and C simply link back to A. The first thing that I’d like to point out is that page A is the big winner, as it has links coming from two sources. Although page A does lose some of it’s PR when linking to the other pages B and C, this is outweighed by the links coming right back.

Let’s hypothetically assume that each page on the Internet begins with a single point of PageRank, and that 85% of it’s PR is given away to pages that get linked to. I didn’t just pull those numbers out of thin air, but they are rather the accepted values used by most webmasters for calculating PR. Proceeding, we can calculate the PageRank of page A by using this formula:

PageRank(A) = .15 + .85 (PR from backlinks)

Looking back at the diagram, we can see that pages B and C each contain only a single link which points back to A. Using the formula above, we can see that .85 PR is given to A from both of the other pages, as the entire 85% is transferred over. Thus, page A will have a PageRank of 1.85 (.15 + .85 from B + .85 from C). Pages B and C both result in a PR of .575 (.15 + .425 from A). The reason that page A gives .425 instead of .85 is because page A has two outbound links, meaning that the PR transferred over has to be shared between all pages being linked to.

Page A: 1.85
Page B: .575
Page C: .575

PageRank cannot be calculated in a single iteration, however. Clearly, page A is the victor, but if those same computations were executed again, the numbers would be slightly different. The second time around, page A would be equal to .15 + .85 (.575 + .575), or 1.1275. After these calculations are performed dozens of times, the values become more and more accurate.

What I’m trying to say is this; backlinks are important. If someone links to this very blog post, my entire website would benefit as a result. The reason is because my entire website is filled with links that circulate throughout all of my pages (kind of like the way all websites operate). The PR that this page would gain as a result of being given a backlink would spread quickly throughout the rest of the site upon performing a dozen or so iterations of PR calculation. The home page, for example, is linked to at the top of every page, so it will naturally have the highest PageRank.

There still remains one unanswered question; how do you get more backlinks? For the most part, providing useful and quality content to your readers is the best way to attempt to generate backlinks. You could also put a link to your site in the signature of a forum that you might actively post on.

If you are having issues with gaining quality backlinks, then perhaps you could clean your website of outbound links. Linking to other websites will lower your PageRank, as seen in the example above. Many people, including myself, believe that it is not a good idea to remove all outbound links from your website. Google’s web crawler doesn’t like running into dead ends while searching the Internet, and if you remove all outbound links, then it will certainly be stuck within your domain and you may be penalized.

Understanding the importance of quality backlinks is essential if you intend on optimizing your website for search engines. If you are relatively new to SEO, then I highly recommend that you read more information on the topic. You may surprise yourself with how effective it can be to make slight changes to the overall design of your website.

Related posts:

1. The Importance of Google PageRank
2. Optimize Your Blog – Simple Ways to Increase Value in Your Content
3. How to Increase Your Google PageRank

Google AdSense is a fun and easy way to earn revenue by placing advertisements on your web pages. As long as your website complies with Google’s terms of service, then it should be no problem at all to gain acceptance into the program. Just two days after deciding that I wanted to publish ads on my website and I was already earning cash. It’s really that simple.

If you’re a webmaster considering to make the jump onto the publisher bandwagon, then you might be overwhelmed at first by the amount of options that are available. I’ve tried other services in the past, but I can confidently say that after using Google AdSense for six months, it is by far the best ad network around.

I am not affiliated with Google in any way, and this blog post is being written purely out of my own free will. I have no incentive to make this article other than to inform my fellow webmasters about an amazing opportunity that shouldn’t be passed. With that said, allow me to back up my claim.

Google, being the Internet giant that it is, has an amazing algorithm that it uses to provide visitors to your site with the most relevant advertisements possible. I have used ad networks in the past that operate in ways that are horrendous. If I write a blog post about programming tips in PHP, I would appreciate it if my readers weren’t exposed to advertisements about weight loss or hair removal.

Advertisements such as those seem to plague the Internet, as there is no corporation other than Google itself that is able to parse through the contents of a web page, determine the most important keywords, take into account the geographic location of the visitor, the time of the day, and dozens of other variables all within a fraction of a second, just to determine which ad would be the most appropriate given the circumstances. Weight loss and hair removal? There’s a time and a place, but not on my website.

Your visitors are at your website because they’re interested in reading about whatever topic it is that you endorse. If advertisements related to that topic are being displayed, then there is a much higher chance that they will attract the reader. Yes, I’m stating the obvious, but it’s very easy to underestimate the importance of relevant ads, and that is where Google shines.

So how easy is it to put up these ads? In the “AdSense Setup” section of the control panel, you can select which types of ads you want to display (text ads, image ads, search bars, etc), the size of the ads, and the color scheme. Designing a color scheme that blends in nicely with your website is critical, as if the advertisements just appear to be tacked on then it certainly doesn’t give the visitor a good impression and may skew their confidence in your credibility.

Google will then generate a small snippet of code which you will place in the source code where you’d like the ads to appear. After that, simply wait ten minutes and Google will take it from there.

So how are earnings computed on a per click basis? First, understand that there are two sides to the trade. Publishers place ads on their website and earn money for sponsoring them, while advertisers pay money to have their ads shown on various other websites.

Advertisers pay money to represent various keywords or key phrases. Someone advertising for a website about dogs might invest in keywords such as “pets”, “dogs”, “chew toys”, or whatnot. For advertisers, this becomes competitive, and certain keywords cost more money than others.

For publishers, however, it works a little differently. Let’s say you are planning on creating a website for the sole intention of generating revenue through Google AdSense. The first thing you would do is decide on a topic for your website. It just so happens that “debt consolidation” is one of the most expensive and competitive keywords in the industry. So why not create a website about debt consolidation?

The flaw with this idea is that there are already so many other websites on this topic for that very reason; it’s worth a lot of money to publishers. If you were to make your very own debt consolidation website, you would find it to be extremely difficult to get traffic, as any Google searches made for that keyword will place thousands and thousands of other websites in front of yours; nobody would find your website.

Not to mention that it is against Google’s terms of service to attempt to manipulate the ads in any way. Google is a smart company, and they cater to their advertisers. I pay money to have my ads shown on others’ websites, and I certainly wouldn’t appreciate it if I didn’t get what I paid for, and Google takes extreme measures to preserve the integrity of their program.

I see Google AdSense as a perk. I operate this blog and inform others about various things simply because it’s my hobby. To put it simply, I get paid for doing what I enjoy, and it is that attitude that makes AdSense a great opportunity for web developers like me.

Related posts:

1. Implementing Google Adsense
2. Investing in AdWords
3. Help From Fellow Webmasters

So if you’re a blogger and still using WordPress 2.9, check to see if your articles are being properly indexed, because failing to make the upgrade to 2.9.1 can be costly to you. Installing the newest version should solve your problems.

Ever since I installed the update earlier today, things have been running smoothly as ever in terms of Googlebot indexing my site.

On a side note, I apologize for making so many articles regarding this issue, but it was something that needed to be resolved. I hope that anyone else suffering from this WordPress glitch has it fixed ASAP.

Detective Joe was on the case, and it is now officially closed. Have a nice day.

Related posts:

1. Google Slow to Index Blog Posts
2. Google’s Slow Indexing Rate for Blog Posts Resolved… Kinda
3. My Impressions on WordPress 3.0