I was doing some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work for a client today when I noticed something alarming.  His Google PageRank had disappeared!  Yikes!  What in the world happened? It turns out that the folks at Google changed the location of some of the files that online tools use to figure out PageRank.  Whew!  We [...]

Recently the small business of a friend was featured on a TV show.  I was so happy for him.  I sent him a congratulatory email.  Then I looked at his website.  Yikes!  He was doing the one thing guaranteed to get him kicked off of Google.  He was using hidden text to try and get [...]

No, Google Caffeine isn’t the latest drink at Starbucks.  It’s the latest version of the Google search algorithm and it may affect your search engine standings. Google is always striving to bring people better search results.   So from time to time they change the way they calculate search results by changing their search algorithm.   It’s [...]

Recently a friend and I were talking about Google search results.  We queried Google for the same term and received different results.  Why?  I was logged into my Google account at the time.  I discovered that Google uses people’s web history to try and give them more relevant search results.  While that might be nice [...]

Do you know what a doppelganger is? The term shows up a lot in horror and science fiction TV shows. On Stargate SG-1 Samantha Carter’s doppelganger is the evil Replicator Samantha. On Star Trek: The Next Generation Data had an evil twin brother named Lore. You get the idea. A googleganger is someone with your [...]

Google PageRank (PR) is a way that Google devised to rank a website’s popularity. Google explains it this way: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B [...]

Do you want to read a REAL horror story? Then check out this article from Forbes about Google Hell. A client of mine went through this recently. Everything was fine and then one day Google didn’t list their site. It wasn’t as though they dropped in the listings. Suddenly they were nowhere to be found [...]