Page Rank – Real vs Visible

Page Rank, named after Larry Page, is a very confusing concept.

First of all there is the REAL page rank which only google knows. Then, there is the publicly viewable page rank on that little green bar (which has no significant privacy issues). It is only a faint distorted shadow of the real page rank. It differs from the REAL page rank since:
- real page rank is continously updated. Visible page rank is updated about 3x annually
- real page rank is a very complex calculation involving the incoming links weighted and adjusted in all sorts of different ways. Visible page rank is a simple count with occassional weird adjustments.

….”This page has been spidered and indexed but not yet ranked, so it makes sense.” Am I right?????
- the visible page rank for this page will someday appear. It will get most of it’s page rank (REAL & visible) from the vocab home page home from which it has a direct link. It will get some of it’s page rank (R & V) from the links that we are adding plus these links will refine for which terms this page ranks.

You are going thru a very similiar process that I went thru 5 years ago when I started T4L. I wish I had blogged about it all the way back. You can read some of it on the early “intermediate SEO” blog. Also, did I ever send you my powerpoint on intro to google?

Think of seo like soccer strategy. There are many basics to master. But then, it’s just an evolving game and much more art and feel than science.

SEO vocabulary

Do you speak SEO? Do you know words like SERP, PR, spam, H1, H2, page title, spider, crawl, and CSS? Many of course are technical acronyms.  You can’t play the game if you don’t the words.

Here’s another game. Speaking English for work, school, or social life. We’re helping people learn with useful Vocabulary Articles. Fro instance, we have writtien on Teaching with Crossword Puzzles, Vocabulary Flash Cards (they’re not obsolete but their leadership as a tool has been usurped by Flash games), how to Expand Your Vocabulary ,Word Power:Developing your Vocabulary , -GRE Verbal Tips , -Improve Through Active Learning .

School home pages

There is a great deal of competition to do well in the search engines for searches by school names.

Frankly, I’m not sure why since it’s not very valuable traffic.    On SpellingCity.com, there are a lot of school pages., mostly, they’re not active. But many are and they have links from the schools. Yet they are not showing up in webmaster tools as page with incoming and outgoing links.
Lets experiment!   :->

 First Presbyterian Church School as of March 3, 2009 now has two links to it’s home page.  The First There are no teachers listed so presumably it’s only one link in. Is this enough for it to show up in webmaster tools.

Spirit will look for this. Oh.  PS.  Schools teach. Tests text. The FCAT vocabulary test is worth preparing for by playing some great word games.

Google testers – What do they do?

I saw this on a resume that I received this week. I thought it was very very interesting. I can’t wait to interview her…

Jobs at Google

§     Google Search Engine Tester

Search Engine Analytical Skills – I would test the search engine for bugs and then figure out what exactly the user is searching for and what’s the best route to get the answer. 

§     Web Results Data Entry

Would receive information on the results user received from search engine and then rate them and enter them into data entry form.  I would rate them if they were useful to the user or not relevant and then apply markings such as “spam” or “malicious” after researching the page.

§     Research

I would receive internet searches and then have to research them (short and long periods of time) to find out more information on them and how I can apply this knowledge to best suit the customer.

How goes Google learn about writing and education?

Google of course is just a big computer which counts and categorizes.  So lets look at how it learns about what is related?  Lets use the example of learning about writing standards, which is an educational question. Lets be more specific and talk about how each state defines it.

Each state has its own educational standards. For each grade, there is specific grade level curriculum standards.  One of these is writing.  How does google understand the concept of teaching writing?  How would google find out what links to a page about teaching writing are relevant and what aren’t? Here’s the principles.

1. Authority sites and word counting. If you are an authority site, Google treats your opinion seriously. They count the words on your site. Lets say you use the words teaching writing alot.  Well, your links out with the words teaching writing will really count a lot.  Lets say you talk about different ways of teaching writing.  Google will understand this if the word count is high. So for instance, on your authority teaching writing site, you talk a lot about six trait writing and four trait writing. Google will consider these to be relevant to each other based on the correlation.  Google does a lot of word counting and correlations.

2. Neighborhoods and links and authority sites.  Google also learns about education and associations by looking at which sites link to what sites.  If there are ten authority sites which link to each other a lot, google considers them a neighborhood and the content is somehow associated.  How does google categorize the association? Again, they rely on keywords.

3. Does google start with any taxonomy of what associations to look for or is it purely statistical?  Traditionally, they relied on DMOZ and the google directory is an exact replication of the dmoz structure and content.  Is this still relevant or has google learned more from their statistics of words and links (and perhaps visits) or do they still rely on the human edited directories for some sort of organization?

I don’t know.  One of the best intermediate seo sites is perhaps worth asking….

Iphone Apps

The questions are easy:

- How to price?
- How much does Apple take?
- How does the marketing work? To Apple? To the public?
- What sort of volumes to expect?  If I’m successful, if I”m not?
- What’s the competition like?
- Any support from Apple?

I went to my local apple store where they knew little to nothing about development or business model or marketing or volumes. They did tell me how to check out existing applications by going to the itunes store (I suspect everyone else but me knew that. I kept going to the iphone application site).

Note iFlipr Flashcards for $.99, spanish anywhere for $9.99,

I’ll start collecting articles…

 

MacResearch article on business model. He mentions: Getting real numbers about the iPhone app market is hard, and I am just relying on the few analyses already out there and on the anecdotal evidence I gathered from iPhone developers (posts on the web and private conversations). Hopefully, the developers of Molecules, Mental Case, PCalc, Grafly, OsiriX, Atom in a Box and the many many other science apps will have more insights in the comments…
A good blog seems to be the Iphone App Entrepreneur which sadly seems to have stopped posting as of Oct 2008.  Specific articles:
Photoshop pieces to demo your iphone concept.
Snippets of sales data from Eliza Block, developer of the crossword puzzle app 2 Across
Rejection risk by apple
Number crunching posts…

TapTapTap shares his sales data. as well as ten iphone user secrets.

Pinch Media Post from summer 08 polemically discussing the pricing focusing on the pressure to be the cheapest.

Compliance Issues for a Small Business

Although I am a small business, there is a moderate but growing amount of paperwork to be compliant.  My process for being compliant.

I periodically ask my accountant, a fancy CPA, what else I should think about?
I periodically ask lawyers (I use several), what else I should think about?
Once I discover an issue, I study it and get compliant and then assign it to my office compliance manager who tracks expirations and renewals etc.

Here’s a quick list of my issues:

S Corp & location  - I’m registered in FL and need to pay up every year. I’m incorporated under a different name so I DBA which requires a ficticious name form. I file Federal income tax, state assets tax, and am licensed to do business in my county and city.

Employment – I pay and track Federal  income tax with-holding, social security, payroll tax, workmans comp, and probably some other payroll things handled thru ADP. Plus we have an array or benefits including HRA, medical insurance, dental insurance, long term disability insurance, death and dismemberment insurance, and a new Simple IRA as of 2009 (thru Fidelity).

Insurance – To get my lease, I signed up for an array of location and other insurances. I refused to get business interruption insurance as too expensive but got all the others. We had to fix my lease for that one.

I’m now adding PCI Compliance to handle credit cards.

PCI Certification

Again, did I misname this blog? My focus is really small business management issues for an online company. Online entrepreneurship might be a trendier moniker. Tonight, on my mind is PCI Certification as a credit card processing merchant.

I don’t store credit cards, I did it all thru others.  Do I need to fill out the PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire? I read that:  The requirement for merchants processing less than 20,000 transactions per year is just a PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire as long as you don’t store any credit card numbers.

Since I’m doing more than 10K transactions per month, I think I might need more than a self-assessment. Yikes! I’ll consult the merchant services credit cards online blog.

PR Zero at the top of the charts – A mystery

I keep seeing sites that are at the top of google for pretty significant keywords but which have no visible PR rank. These are not necessarily new sites.  What gives?

I thought the recent update in December of PR would have made these visible green toolbars more meaningful since they were all updated.  But there are so many zeros.

Why?

Supplementary Index

I’m learning a lot about the supplementary index in Google and how to study it.

First, use the  mapelli tool to get a sense of how many of your pages are langushing in the  neverland of the supplementary index.

Here’s the next unanswered question. Any methodfor sorting thru the google results to find the 193 pages that aren’t in the main index?

Here are two possibilities….

1. I take the total listing and copy them into a document. But, since Google returns results 10 at a time, I will have to do this 56 times. Then, I’ll take the main listing results and one by one, remove them from my list until I find the 193 that are left.

2. The webmaster tool can be used to find the pages that have zero internal or external links. While these pages might actually have links, this is google’s way of communicating that these pages have been put into the supplementary index.

Once I know which pages are in the index, I imagine I’ll see why they are in the index. They might be:
- duplicate or nearly duplicate pages
- pages with no link support
- pages with no text content (all graphics or flash)