Archive for April, 2008

Google PR update, exciting times?

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

I just noticed that Google is performing a pagerank update. I haven’t been following the last PR updates, I don’t really care anymore. The only thing that matters to me are SERPs, Search Engine Results Pages. Good SERPs are the only thing that matters if you want a site to get lots of traffic from search engines. Page rank has nothing to do with the amount of traffic you get. But a site that has good SERPs for a competitive keyword will probably have some PR. When I first started out as a webmaster I was constantly checking webmaster forums to see if there was a PR update. For a lot of webmasters it has become an obsession, topics on webmaster forums about PR updates are always very popular.

I just checked some of my domains and found some weird things, I have a dot com domain from a failed project, it doesn’t do any traffic and until recently it had PR0. It did have some good backlinks but Google didn’t love it :p I just checked it with all the tools that I could find and some say it has PR4. Not bad if the PR is real, I was planning on selling the domain so if it really has PR4 I might get some decent money for it.

Most of the online tools are broken for the moment. I checked iwebtool, checkpagerank and a couple of others and none are showing me results for any of my domains. We will need to have some patience to see what we are getting from Google. The seoquake plugin for mozilla is also showing strange results, I think it only shows cached results. This online pagerank checker is still working but I don’t have clue if the results are correct.

Domain with lots of backlinks.

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

When browsing the domain for sale section at digitalpoint I found this sports related domain for sale. The owner claims it has 35000 backlinks according to Yahoo. That’s a lot of backlinks for a 1 year old domain. And my Google toolbar says it’s page rank 3, so it must be getting some link juice from somewhere. I checked where all those backlinks are coming from… And then I found out how it was possible to get that many backlinks. The domain has sitewide links from a big forum with lots of pages indexed. It has some other backlinks but most are not related to sports. The backlinks from the forum have no real anchor text, so they don’t have much value in seo terms. The sitewide links from the forum are probably paid for, so my guess is that after the sale of the domain they will all be gone. The owner of the domain has a buy it now price of 700$. I don’t think it’s worth a tenth of that price. But hey who am I :)

Finally updated to Wordpress 2.5

Monday, April 14th, 2008

I finally updated this blog to the new Wordpress 2.5 version. I first installed it on my home server to check if all my plugins still work with this release. That’s always the biggest concern when upgrading your wp blog, making sure that all the plugins are compatible. I have only come across one problem, on one of my blogs I use the embedded video plugin, unfortunately it doesn’t work anymore with wordpress 2.5. I have checked the developers website but there hasn’t been an update for some time. So I’m sticking to Wordpress 2.3.3 for that blog. I’ve spent quite some time googling for a fix but haven’t find one. It’s a very popular plugin and a lot of people are waiting for an update so hopefully someone finds a fix fast.

I haven’t had much time to check out all the new features but the new admin panel looks very different, they have moved a lot of things around. For someone that has been using Worpress for a couple of years its quite a change. There are some cool things, it’s now possible to customize the admin panel with widgets. So you can see only the things you want and so on. Coolest new feature of all is the exif extraction, when you upload a picture that has exif data it will extract that data and put it in custom fields. This is really great for photo blogs.