I have just read the BrowseRank document released by Microsoft regarding their work on a new alternative to PageRank and TrustRank.

Basically, the whole ranking algorithm comes down to giving more value to visitor behavior, as opposed to simply counting and valuating the number of links pointing towards a web page. Visitor clicks and time spent on a web page are key factors in determining its ranking potential.

The document explains the mathematical theories behind BrowseRank, and although this is more useful for search engineers, I got a pretty good picture of where they are going with this. The point is this is just the beginning, and there is a lot more work that’s going to happen before BrowseRank gains real validity.

Since it relies on recording user behavior, there are small obstacles in front of BrowseRank.

First of all there is the privacy issue (users have to opt-in for data to be gathered), and although their document states they used data from millions of visitors who opted in for the purpose of research, the question remains whether BrowseRank can actually work in the long term if it has to rely on users opting in to be tracked all the time. Not that we are not tracked already without permission by numerous web sites already, but that’s another story. I suppose social networking data can also be used to this effect (social bookmarking perhaps), but the other dimension is still critical - how will they manage to record time spent on pages in an easy and unobtrusive way?

What the document also mentions is that BrowseRank is a more valid measure of a page’s importance since it takes into account clicks and time spent on a page, and is thus more immune to manipulation techniques already present with PageRank. It is believed that a person will not click to a page and spend time there unless there is good content and their need for information has been answered. I think there is room for manipulation here as well, since you can theoretically engage an army of users to use a search engine, click on a specified result and go spend some time there, and gather “points” for a particular page to “help” it rank better for related search queries. Naturally, this is a very naive scenario, but quite plausible.

Nevertheless, BrowseRank is an interesting evolution of search, and is quite welcome in my opinion. Is it going to give Microsoft (Live Search) the edge to ride the same waves with Google and Yahoo? Well, I am just not sure. I think it’s going to take a lot more than that.

A really independent and safe way to rank content on the internet has yet to be found. Basically, if it involves people and their behavior, it’s going to be open to manipulation. Maybe we’ll get there some day, but not just yet… Anyway, my two cents.

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So, Live Search has rolled out a new look for its home page. Well, it’s different, even interesting, but hopefully not the only thing they are going to change in their quest to improve their presence in the search arena.

In addition to this, Microsoft have published a document explaining their approach to ranking pages with a new rank criterion called BrowseRank (as opposed to Google’s PageRank, which they say is inferior to BrowseRank). Basically, BrowseRank is all about searcher online behavior (clicks and time spent on page) as a more accurate measure of a page’s importance, rather than simply relying on number of incoming links and on-page ranking factors. The BrowseRank document is available here, so check it out.

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I’ve been busy last couple of weeks working on a small scale site for a friend who has a villa on the Adriatic coast. The villa offers rooms and apartments, and the potential clients come from various countries in Europe. They wanted the site to contain content in three languages - English, Italian and Croatian. This posed somewhat of a challenge, as we were faced with a decision on how to implement multilingual content on a single site, and have the benefit of Google actually indexing it and showing the appropriate pages in search results.

Having addressed this issue before in previous projects, and having read a lot about others’ opinions on best practices, I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t a pure best practice in this case, but rather best logic approach. We decided to store content in different languages in subfolders on the site (rather than subdomains). The site is in Croatian by default (root), while English and Italian are in subfolders (/en and /it respectively).

Bottom line is, we have achieved positive results, as most pages are ranked for targeted queries for their appropriate language in the top 20, some even in the top 10, and all this without link building and other off-site SEO. I don’t expect the pages to keep ranking well for too long without additional off-site SEO work, but for now this is pretty good.

This is the second time a site I worked on produced satisfactory search engine results for multilingual content stored in subfolders, rather than on subdomains or separate domains altogether. I am more and more convinced that the choice of content structure should be viewed from the logical/development/usability point of view, rather than worrying too much about how Google is going to digest content in different languages on the same site. The key may be consistency - make it easy for the observer to understand the content structure, and stick to it without adding unnecessary layers of complication.

If content organization seems logical and easy to understand to a human looking at the content structure on a site, I am pretty sure a search engine algorithm will understand it just as well. Naturally, depending on the size and level of localization, a site can require very different approaches for housing multilingual content, as described in this document.

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StomperNet decided to open up again. Las year it was for 72 hours, this time there is no specific time frame. This video features the cases of several sites (one of which a newbie at the time), and a site that did quite well and raked in plenty of organic traffic from Google, and then was dropped from the Google index, causing its traffic to reduce by about 50%. The site pulled through, but not only that, it increased its revenue and client base as well. This was done through a unique approach to PPC advertising - by doing all the wrong things! Check it out, and BTW it’s about 53 minutes, so grab a coffee and concentrate (trust me, when the ball starts rolling you’ll have to make an effort to keep up):

Interesting stuff in there! For example, the OCI (Online Commercial Intention) tool developed by Microsoft was a great reminder. Also, a few nice pointers when doing PPC campaigns for your site, like the AdWords Triangulation Method (quite interesting).

I’m thinking of making a “Video of the Week” category, in which I’d post a video I thought was an interesting to watch for whatever practical reason (fun included). There have been a few in the past months that are worth mentioning. I don’t know, I’ll see how things go…

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I just read a great post on Sugarrae.com, written by Rae Hoffman. The post is actually a Q&A session with eleven link development experts, include the author of the post. There are a lot questions covered, so prepare yourself for a lengthy read. The questions covered are:

1. What are the top 5 or 10 “open” link sources that you still use?
2. Are you afraid of talking about link building in public for fear that Matt might want to make you an example?
3. How much do you stress internal linking on your own or clients’ sites?
4. If you had 7 days to train a link developer, which concepts would you focus on each day as the most important concepts?
5. How will recent trends such as personalization and universal search affect the way SEO’s develop and execute link building strategies?
6. Reciprocal links work. Do you recommend it and how is it different today? If you don’t recommend, why not?
7. Do you think the search engines are currently taking steps to dampen the effects of bursty style link growth that is typical of viral content? Do you think they will in the future?
8. …how long do you think it will be before webmasters stop trusting Google advice in general? What will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? How polluted will the link graph get when webmasters realize Google has no real control over it? What links will still pass weight in that sort of free for all linking environment?
9. In Google’s algothrim updates for 2008, what changes do you expect in terms of how links come into play?
10. What in your opinion are the three top “footprints” you see SEO’s leave when developing links that would flag them as “unnatural” to you?
11. You have a brand new web site devoted to deep sea rescue equipment and education. You have one and only person who can work full time on link building for the next 90 days, then they will leave forever, and nobody will be able to do any link building work beyond that time. The site will continue to have new content added on a monthly basis forever. What advice would you give them?

The last one is a bit long, I couldn’t simply show the question because the introduction bit is quite important. By the way, my favorite part of the whole post. Question number 4 is also quite interesting.

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I just read an article by Danny Sullivan on Seach Engine Land, which goes into detail about Google’s Universal Search and the directions its heading for in 2008. The post is quite long, so make a cup of Joe’s and concentrate. It’s a review of all the changes Google has introduced in the past months since the introduction of Universal Search. Read it here.

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Wiep Knol wrote an interesting post outlining four different types of authority links. He divides authority links into absolute and relative authority links, depending on the site hosting an incoming link. Both absolute and relative authority links are further divided into informational links and navigational links.

The post then goes into link acquisition techniques and gives another seven ways to obtain links. These include link trading, columns/guest posts/interviews, link buying, request proposal links, .edu links, academic research links, links on chamber of commerce websites.

If you’re going to do link building, this post will give you a good starting point to consider before you delve into it. I thought this post was informative enough to link to it using targeted keywords as anchor text.

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Bill Slawski (SEO by the Sea), wrote an interesting post about Google filing a new patent on snippets. Basically, there is a rather complex effort behind the way Google shows snippets in search engine results. Ranging from snippet size and keyword relevancy to more complex things like snippet weight adjustment, the patent mentions many things previously unknown about this. The document makes references to another document still not published, which should contain some more detailed information about the methods and technology behind snippets.

I already wrote a bit about Google snippets before. Recently, the video featuring Matt Cutts discussing the anatomy of a Google search result brought a much needed explanation about so many questions asked about what has/can be done to influence what Google shows as the page description in the search results.

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I’ve just read a great article on Wiep Knol’s site, in which he combined opinions of 17 link building professionals who have expressed their thoughts on factors that determine the value of a link. Every factor has been judged on a 1-5 scale, 1 being “no influence” and 5 being “very strong influence”. Each factor is assigned a final mark that represents the average from marks given by all participants. The article is abundant with explanations and comments, but most importantly it is a mixture of opinions by so many established link building experts, which should be an interesting read for anyone involved with SEO and link building. Oh, and finally, everyone seems to agree that Alexa rank is not important, or very remotely important at best, as a link value factor.

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As continuation of the video series, started with the Anatomy of a Google search result video about two weeks ago, this is the new video featuring Matt Cutts, who explains the usage of the ALT attribute in image tags. It’s a pretty basic explanation of what the attribute does, its purpose, but again, he gives numeric data (and that’s what we all want ) near the very end of the video - the number of words to be used in the ALT attribute that won’t be deemed as spam by Google. If your site features images that are good quality and theme specific, you can do something more with them. Add descriptive ALT attributes, and show up in Google Images queries. You can then try to get links from webmasters who’d like to use an image from your site on their own projects. Here’s one way to do this.

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