Many people have been running around screaming ‘woe is me, I am undone’ and ‘My poor family how will I live with the shame of telling them I have been PR Zeroed by Google?'’

WHY is this Old Welsh Guy’ I hear you ask, and a damn fine question it is as well

For those of you who are wondering what on earth PR0 means, I ask you how on EARTH did you find your way hear LOL. The answer is that PR (PageRank) is the system Google uses for measuring the importance of a page (not to be confused with where the page ranks in a search, this is a different beast with over 150 elements combining to decide, with PR being one of them).

Anyhow back to the matter in hand. I have a rugby forum that has been PR zeroed. It still ranks top or close to the top for the phrase ‘rugby forum’ and traffic is as high as ever (in fact it has gone up).

 So to those worrying about how they will feed their families now they have lost their PR I say ‘Worry not my friends, for PR is nothing, and Google is currently Updating’.

I will tell you the story of the two Bulls.

Once upon a time there were two bulls. The bulls one day were at the top of hill when the young bull noticed the cows were coming into the field. “why don’t we run down there and make love to one of them cows” said the young bull. ”

“How about we WALK down, and have them all” said the Old bull

The moral is not to worry, it is a situation that is not harming rankings, so it is nothing to worry about (unless you sell PR based links of course in which case you should be forced to dress up as a cow and meet the two bulls in the story above)

Back in work now, Christmas is over (i went to an Epiphany service today in church and the carols seemes SOOOO last year so it must be )

Work is here, 2006 has gone, 2007 is here, and to mark the occasion my good friend Matt has finally launched a blog (no doubt a new years resolution along with

1. lose weight

2. get the big promotion

3. reduce the credit card bills

4. have less sex!

OK I lied about reducing the credit card bills .

Anyhow Matt’s blog is now live and ready to roll. so please let me know if he stops posting so I can slap him around a bit on his Internet marketing forum where I moderate.

Is it any good? Well I moderate there so at least you can be sure that there will be plenty of off topic stuff going on.

Well folks it sems like DMOZ has gone forever! A post on Rich Skrentas blog (founder of DMOZ) says

Apparently the machine holding dmoz in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system.

So for the past 6 weeks, a few folks have been trying to patch the system back together again (reverse engineering from the latest RDF dump, I suppose). But 6 weeks is a very long outage. Add in the massive AOL layoffs last week, and it’s not clear if there’s even any left over there who cares. Even if some form of the ODP editing system is brought back, the likelihood of continued existence within AOL seems extremely doubtful.

dmoz doesn’t exactly operate on a model of transparency, to say the least, so they have been keeping the details of what happened private. Perhaps they’re concerned about an exodus of the remaining editors, or gleeful proclamations of death from the SEM industry. The remaining ODP editors will probably be mad at me for discussing this, but they get mad at me whenever I talk about the ODP….ironic! :-) Hey guys, it’s 2006, open up.

read more at his blog…

Danny Sullivan yesterday wrote his final post on Search engine watch. It is of course his goodbye speach, but it was not goodbye and thanks for all the fish, indeed it was upbeat, and is a tribute the professionalism that Danny has.

read it here

Danny’s goodbye speech

Danny Sullivan yesterday wrote his final post on Search engine watch. It is of course his goodbye speach, but it was not goodbye and thanks for all the fish, indeed it was upbeat, and is a tribute the professionalism that Danny has.

read it here

Danny’s goodbye speech

Lately I am getting a lot of emails about SEO tools, bought, free online and offline. Questions range from “is this worth the money” to “will this get me to number 1 on Google”. This has brought me to the conclusion that I should add a product and services review on this blog, and also on my website!

The first product I will be reviewing will be Karon Thakstons Copy-writing Course To be honest I can’t wait to review this product (and another she has provided me with), as I have heard good things about it!

Here is the thing though, I intend to write no nonsense reviews of products, I am now asking anyone to let me know of any tools, websites, online or offline services like directory submissions etc, and I will review them here on the blog. If the tool is your own then please let me know as it will make life easier when I have to contact you to answer any potential questions I might have. Feel free though to propose other peoples products or services.

Hopefully we can build up a good resource for ourselves, and others.

 I would like to add that even though there are affiliate schemes with some of the products I will be reviewing, I will not be including affiliate links from the site, as I feel it might be seen to undermine my objectivity.

So either suggest here, email me, or use the contact form on this site.

This is a response to a question about relevance and trustrank. Hope you like it! 

Relevance and trustrank are different things. To appreciate them you have to step back!

Trust rank is a system that shores up the original back rub aglorithm. Links are STILL a good way to work out how important a site is, PROVIDING, you can work out how important the sites are in the beginning.  I have written an article about trust rank here http://www.umbrella-consultancy.co.uk/art1-trustrank.htm

So if the BBC sports site, link to my rugby site, and I link to your football site, then there is a definite sports theme going on there right? BUT, and this is the thing here  another football site might link to yours, but they have hardly any trusted links pointing to them, so even though they are more closely relevent, their link will not carry as much weight as mine!

There is a lot more to it than this though, for example……… (Read on …)

Recently there has been a pagerank (PR) update in the Google index. so, I thought now would be a good time to blog about PR and its importance.

OK firstly what does this PR update actually mean, and will it have an effect on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s)? Well what it means is simply that Google has updated the public facing PR values., will this affect rankings? Not in the least! (sorry to break hearts) WHY is this OWG ‘I hear you ask’ . well I shall explain… (Read on …)

Is Google raising the LSI element in the algo? I have thought for a while now that Google is using some sort of semantic element in their algorithm, but now I think it has been increased. LSI will totally turn on its head the importance of on topic linking, and a lot of the sites that have ‘bombed’ their way to the top will take a hit. For those of you who do not know what Semantics is, the dictionary says…. (Read on …)

WHY? Why do so many directories only allow the submission of your homepage? How can a site that covers multiple topics have the home page as its most relevant page for all of them? It cant. So we have launched a new deep-link only directory called www.deeplylinked.com submit your deep link most relevant pages to whatever categories you have and get the traffic you deserve.

YES this is blatant self promotion, but it is a resource that i believed was missing online. Currently it is free, but we will be charging in the future.