Posted on by Catalin Ionescu

SEO Advice: What good is PageRank nowadays?

Coming straight from the Google HQ, this is actually a gem about what PageRank really is worth for these days.

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » SEO advice: url canonicalization

Normally if you don’t see crawled snippets and only see urls, it usually means that it would help to have more links to your site. More PageRank helps to get more crawling.

Now, this isn’t exactly hot news, as many people knew about – and have actively used – inbound links from high PageRank pages to ensure timely spidering. During my experiments I’ve been able to get brand new websites noticed and indexed by search engines, especially Google and MSN, in 12 hours or less with just two or three inbound links from PR 3 – 5 pages.

But it’s somewhat comforting to know PageRank is still used for something other than a distraction, if you know what I mean 😀

Posted on by Catalin Ionescu

Ultimate Tag Warrior 3

Ultimate Tag Warrior 3

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a multi-headed hydra of a plugin. It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in WordPress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors […]

Once you’ve got your tags entered; you enter a realm of interesting ways of doing things with your tags. […] At the simpler end, you can automagically have tags included at the top and bottom of your posts without making changes to themes.

Think about coupling this with the Related Posts plugin to get a really powerful tool.

But… if you don’t mess with links or change Permalinks on a daily basis you shouldn’t be having 404’s in the first place, should you?

And if you do need to change Permalinks or update the page/post slugs, see how you can actually benefit from it and increase your Google PageRank as you go. 😉

Posted on by Catalin Ionescu

WordPress Plugin: Related posts for your 404

Related posts for your 404

How would you like the ability to display related entries on a 404 page? It would be really handy.

This plugin displays related posts depending on which page tried to be accessed, and it does so by attempting to match the keywords in the requested URL – basically the post slug – with the keywords from other post slugs.

You might need to tweak your Permalink structure to make it work.

I have a really neat idea for a plugin that will actually take into account tags and even keywords from other posts when displaying related ones so it’s not relying on a certain Permalink structure to work. Let me know if you’re interested, and I might squeeze it in one of these days.