Updating Content

As of last Friday I am not a website developer! I expect to begin my new job in the next few weeks. As of yet I am not sure whether it will be more or less relevant to Search Engine Optimisation than my previous job. Anyway, enough about me, let's get back to SEO! In order to maintain a high ranking on Search Engine Results Pages, it is a good idea to update your content fairly regularly. Search Engines want to show their users relevant content. Suppose I search for 'information technology in Ireland' and the search engine has two relevant articles in its index. If one of the articles was last updated in 1999 and the other was last updated in 2006, then one would expect that the article from 2006 is more likely to interest me. You can expect a good search engine to follow this principle. Therefore it is important to keep your website updated with new and relevant information. From a non-SEO point of view, another benefit of always having fresh content is that you can entice visitors to return to your website frequently. Almost all good SEO techniques are of benefit to the user of the website as well as the search engines, and most of the optimisation techniques currently promoted by Google will help improve the user-friendliness of a website and make it more searchable.

Google Toolbar - Page Rank

I'd like to begin by apologising for not posting to this blog last week. I was in Morocco and decided to wait until I returned to Ireland to post again. I'm also in the process of switching jobs so everything is very busy here at the moment. Anyway, since I got back, I noticed an update of the Google Toolbar's Page Rank on some sites that I've been keeping an eye on. It's very difficult to say exactly how these features work, but, for what it's worth, I'll let you know the approach that I take to the Page Rank feature on the Google Toolbar. First of all, the feature is not search-specific, so, in some cases, it's possible you are getting some valuable hits through Google for a niche term without having a high page rank. Secondly, from what I can see, the feature is not updated very often - I do not think a change in the Page Rank on your Google Toolbar will be seen in your position for specific searches on Google. It is more likely that Google will have adjusted any rankings/scorings for your page each time it was crawled by Googlebot and the feature on the Toolbar is only updated occasionally to reflect the changes of the past few weeks/months. It is also possible that there is a time latency between when Page Rank is calculated and when it actually appears on the Toolbar on your browser. If this is the case, then the Page Rank on the toolbar may never actually accurately represent how well Google rates your page. I also believe that the feature on the Toolbar may not be as stringent as the actual algorithms used by Google. Sometimes pages that do not look like they are very Search Engine Friendly appear with relatively high Page Rank values, I think that this may be because the Page Rank feature does not carry out some checks that are normally carried out by Google's 'real' algorithms. Having said all that, if we are aware of the possible limitations of the feature, we may be able to use it as a rough guide. As I said earlier in the article, it is difficult to say exactly how these things work, I have just given my educated opinion. There are more articles that can be easily found on the internet regarding this topic including some that include references to correspondence with Google themselves on the matter.