There’s been a lot going on in the past days regarding PageRank changes. Google has decided to follow through on their promise to combat paid links and sites selling links. The main effect is a significant drop in PageRank, which is probably a way to reduce value for paid links (if they indeed are sold solely on the basis of high PageRank) and discourage webmasters to purchase links, although there seems to be no changes regarding anchor text. Google has done a few things to stir things up and many are suffering. It seems that not only sites with paid links have been affected. There is also speculation that Google is also hitting on sites with excessive cross-linking, although they may simply be reducing the value of certain groups of links. With every major change such as this, the innocent are bound to get burned as well. Some sites have experienced drops and other negative changes even without having bought or sold links, while others who engage in these practices have not been affected at all. Indeed, there are surprises in this Google update. Many of the sites that were affected are well known and popular authority sites in their own content category.

Google has flexed some muscle, and the effect is pulsating across the Web. Sites that depend solely on traffic sent by Google are definitely going to feel the change. Sites that did nothing wrong, but were still affected, should work on broadening their promotion efforts to include other sources of traffic such as social networks, community sites and other search engines. If a site depends solely on Google for traffic than a major change like this will definitely have a very negative effect on site and business performance. Good news is that, so far, there seems to be little change in traffic, although if changes prove to be related to overall ranking as well, changes in traffic will probably happen.

This blog was PageRank 0 until yesterday, now it’s PR 2 (at the time of writing, who knows about tomorrow). BTW, it was PR 2 a couple of weeks ago, for about two days. Was that the beginning of this PageRank update and I missed it? What I’m trying to illustrate is that pagerank obsession is a waste of time, unless you sell links based on this criterion.

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An announcement on YouTube blog said YouTube design changes are under way. So far there’s only one example of the new look, and apart from layout changes, the new look sports much stronger colors, which users may or may not find attractive. There is much more contrast which is a drastic change from the current look. See for yourself, current and new look:

Other changes:

• Categories will now be found under the “Videos” tab,
• Dropdown menus make for a smoother transition when clicking through popular pages, ie. “Most Viewed,” “Top Favorites,” “Recently Featured,” etc. ,
• Tabs and video browsing pages have a new overall look and feel.

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Amit from Digital Inspiration shared some statistics about Facebook Flyer campaigns. The numbers could be better, although as some of the comments pointed out, the number of impressions and clicks may be a little too small for any conclusive analysis. Anyway, according to the data shown, Facebook Flyers could do better click-through rate and conversion wise. A 0.6% click through rate on CPC based flyers (FB Flyers Pro) is hardly impressive. For a targeted user group, these ads should do much better. Are you using Facebook Flyers as part of your online marketing efforts? What kind of numbers are you getting?

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I ran into this post on Valleyvag which discusses indications that Facebook employees may have access and actually check members’ profiles and private information. Not very amusing, if true. For now there have been incidents of employees looking into things like whose profile a member frequently visits, but what can and do they really look at? Our messages perhaps? Is our privacy really protected on Facebook according to their privacy policy? The seed of doubt has definitely been sowed.

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Found this on Laptopmag.com who did a review of the newly born ASUS Eee PC. I already wrote about the Eee PC hitting the market earlier, but this is the first actual review I’ve come across. The review also features a nice photo gallery of the Eee PC, so enjoy.

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There is a lot of coverage on this in the past two days - the big news that Microsoft snatched the deal with Facebook right under Google’s nose (official press release here and here). The investment itself, even though small ($240 million) compared to its last financial quest with aQuantive which cost them $6 billion, represents a far greater value for Microsoft. With an exclusive deal for ad distribution on Facebook, Microsoft gets a very good opportunity for international market penetration, since about 60% of Facebook users are actually based outside of US. Whether Facebook is actually worth the $15 billion that it’s now valued at (after this deal) is questionable. The site has yet to show a major revenue generating model (that actually works). Facebook Flyers were a good start (similar to PPC ads in many ways), and there are Facebook Polls as well (pay for opportunity to do detailed targeted research using Facebook demographics data and users). The fact that Facebook is now valued at $15 billion is not that important for Microsoft, because they got what they wanted - more exposure and chance for growing revenue on a phenomenon that some compare to Skype.

Naturally, there are reasons to think the $15 billion valuation of Facebook is not realistic, even indications that recent valuations for other Internet companies are leading into another bubble crisis. Facebook is moving forward for now and doesn’t show signs of slowing down. Changes are constantly happening with new possibilities emerging almost weekly. Hype or reality? No one can state with certainty, but the Facebook cake tastes so good, even the most skeptical are feeling the urge to take a bite. There are plenty of pieces of this cake to dish out for now, but at a certain point someone is going to have to pick up the check. Microsoft already paid its piece $240 million and will probably make much more than by the time things go bad (f they go bad).

On the other hand, AdCenter will be one more distribution platform richer, and what a targeted platform that will be! With all the detailed demographic data on Facebook, it should be easier than ever to user PPC ads and get better results. With increasing PPC prices, sometimes reaching ridiculous amounts, this will be a good change. Sure, the prices will probably be just as high, but the targeting will be much better, and thus the results much more precise. Or at least that’s the idea Microsoft/Facebook, right?

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Google shows what it calls sitelinks for certain queries, and then only for some sites or domains. They appear below the first result on the results page (usually a domain name that contains most or all the keywords from the query), and represent shortcuts to specific content on that site that Google thinks may help you get to the information you need quicker than by manually navigating the site.

Where is the added value? Well, if you own a nice generic domain name that may collect a fare amount of type in traffic, having additional sitelinks show up on a Google search page can only increase the possibility that a visitor will actually end up on your site. Sitelinks, even though claimed by Google as automatically generated by the search algorithm (or see below), give an image of authority for a domain name. So the value of a generic domain name, with the appropriate content on the site and a nice amount of traffic, is increased even further for having additional exposure on Google, which most probably means more traffic. If you were to sell your domain name (and website), which incidentally has sitelinks showing up in Google, you’d probably get a little extra cash for the added value. Ok, that’s great, but what if sitelinks don’t appear for your site?

Bookworm SEO posted an interesting post about his attempt to do research on Google sitelinks on his blog. In this Part 1 of his research post series, he gives a list of 100 sites that Google sitelinks show up for. Sounds interesting, and I’m looking forward to see if he actually comes up with definitive results. I suppose Google will also be interested in seeing this, although I doubt they’ll acknowledge his results should they prove to be valid.

In the meantime, this is what Google says about sitelinks in Webmaster Guidelines:

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

You can aslo see this on Google Webmaster Guidelines.

For now, webmasters can tell Google not to show sitelinks for their site through the Webmaster Tools dashboard, and that sums up all the control webmasters have over sitelinks.

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For all those using Plaxo (Pulse) - now you can show your pulse to others by embedding this widget into your site pages. It’s a breeze to create and embed into existing pages. I don’t really see any great benefit from this though, unless you embed this widget into a site you own (for example into your MySpace page, or on Facebook) and want to promote your other site/blog with a social approach through Pulse (well, ok I guess that’s one benfit ). Anyway, this is what the widget looks like in action…

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There is a new working draft for the HTML5 specification which covers client-side database storage. The interface language is SQL and done through API calls with JavaScript. The specification document is still in the works so changes are going to happen over the coming period. WebKit has already built a working example of the new specification. In order for this to work though you need to download and install the API (which they call nightly builds) which is about 10Mb. Source code is also available for download, for those who want to play around with it. The API is asynchronous and it uses callback functions keep track of results from a database query. The new standard will be a great improvement, although the need to install supporting software (APIs) is something that may prevent large scale adoption.

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It seems Facebook is continuing to open its content for the general public. After making user profiles visible to the general public (and search engines), Facebook applications will soon be available also, or rather the about pages for applications. These application about pages will be visible to the search engines which means that users will be able to use search engines to find Facebook apps. Logged out users will be able to read reviews and discussion boards so they can get the full picture of what the application has to offer. Privacy will be respected, so the pages will only show first names for all users, and profile pictures only if the user/developer has allowed this in their private security settings. Users who are not logged in on Facebook will only be able to view content on the about pages.

According to the post on Facebook Developers, the goal of this changes is to make developers’ applications more visible to the public so users can find applications they love using, and gain more potential users who’ll try the apps. Application about pages should appear in the search results of search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Live and ASK in the next couple of days.

I am not sure visitors will search applications “they love using” on search engines. If they love using them, it’s probably because they already use Facebook regularly. Do they really need to look for Facebook applications in places other than Facebook? The new change will be more beneficial in terms of search engine marketing (SEO in particular). The developer company or individual developer will benefit by getting found on the search engine through such an authoritative site or page. A link from the about page to another site (developer’s blog or home site) would be very valuable in that case. With Google (working on its own social network) and other search engines making attempts on getting more exposure on Facebook, the “SE visible” application about pages are about to take on a very significant role. Developing applications and a presence on Facebook is becoming an important Internet marketing ingredient for companies, and as such an important part of SEO in the future.

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