What the heck is NOODP, you ask? In this article I’m going to show you a little known meta tag, recently introduced by major search engines, that allows you to control exactly what they display in the search results for your website. This can make all the difference between customers clicking on to your website or your competitors. Read more
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 😀
Simple tricks to preserve and increase Google PageRank
Relevant incoming links are the lifeblood of SEO. Thus it is very important when you do maintenance tasks on your website – such as changing the Permalink structure in your WordPress blog – to make sure old URLs still work.
There are a lot of techniques that help users access old URLs, but only one of them is pretty effective for preserving whatever link gain you’ve accumulated. And that is the use of 301 redirects. This technique can be applied to any kind of website, not just blogs.
To make sure your PR isn’t lost when you restructure old links, stick a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. And the easiest way to do that is by using rewrite rules in your .htaccess.
TIP: Since 301 redirects pass the accumulated link gain, think what will happen if you use them for 2 or more old URLs and set the redirect target from all of them to the same destination URL. This technique can be used as a quick and effective way to boost a new page Rank to the sum of the link popularity of all old pages that now redirect to it.
As with any SEO technique, over-doing it can hurt your website. But used responsibly it can provide the extra advantage in front of your competitors.