ranking

A patent for "systems and methods for improving the ranking of news articles" was granted to Google yesterday. It was originally filed in 2003.

As you may know, Google's Matt Cutts frequently answers questions from Google users on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. There are a couple recent ones in which he addresses questions about directories and how they contribute to a site's rankings. The first question is: Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW (Best of the Web) as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sells links?

Search Engine Marketing and SEO have always been very dynamic fields.  Search engines make changes all of the time.  Sometime they announce their changes, sometimes we are left to guess at them.  In either event, more often than not, we are left  largely to our own devices in terms of assessing the impact of these changes and what to do about them - if anything.

Among SEO professionals, there isn’t always consensus on precisely which and to what degree site factors contribute or detract from rankings on Google because the factors actually vary by industry. There are indeed, a number of contentious issues: markup and content quality, use of title tags, site organization and even arguments that Google Analytics data factors in to site rankings. Not likely (yet), but certainly up for debate among SEO professionals.

It's not all about traffic. It's about conversions. But it's hard to get conversions if you don't have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too. Which engines besides web search do you see big traffic from? Comment.

A recent SEOBook article highlights a good deal of evidence that Google is placing more emphasis on brands than ever before. Author Aaron Wall takes an in depth look at how Google's algorithm has evolved over his own SEO career, and points out some hints Google has provided in the media as to where its headed before answering a few questions from me for this article.

Did you know that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine and the 4th largest web property?  It also attracts hundreds of millions of users a month, and 15 hours of video are uploaded every minute. A web presence with that much power really shouldn't be ignored. At SMX West, YouTube Product Manager Matt Liu made these points, and they are good points to consider when it comes to your marketing. Liu encourages users to "Take advantage of what YouTube has to offer."

“The top position is no longer winner-take-all,” Bryan Horling, a Google software engineer in charge of Personalized Search, told the SMX West audience in Santa Clara California. After a decade of trying to claim that prize, that may or may not be good news to some. (Coverage of SMX West continues at Murdok Videos.  Keep an eye on Murdok for more notes and videos from the event this week.)