I was reading about Google showing more results from a domain in their results. This is good for several reasons, but it is not anything to get too excited over, because the buzz is stupid, just like the update.

Here’s what it will look like:

Here’s what Google said:

Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh]

How is this any different than the normal sitelink alorithm (besides the amount of links displayed)? This is making a bunch of people think that Google is changing something about what they think is relevant in their algorithm, but I have a different theory, and I think mine makes more sense.

I think that since the Yahoo! and Bing Collabo announcement came out, Google is losing ground on how “awesome” their search engine can be. This is one of those “one-up” situations like: “Oh yeah, Yahoo is powered by Bing, but now we display more results in sitelinks, so we’re still ahead of the curve…” Most likely, this is one of those situations where Google has nothing cool to throw around, but they still want to be heard, so they’re changing stupid stuff and calling them algorithmic changes to excite the stupid.

 I’m going to put myself out there and say that this will have no impact on your current rankings, and if you blame your ranking failure on one small change in the SERP display algo, you deserve to lose whatever flimsy rankings you had in the first place. This is standard “we are still relevant” behavior.

One of the most difficult pieces of SEO is finding great linking opportunities. This review will take you through the steps of finding great linking opportunities for those quick and easy backlinks. This method may come across spammy, or a bit blackhat, but if used correctly and ethically – you won’t have any problems. Remember, if you are going to take this walkthrough to a whole new level, and spam the web, don’t use this technique for any primary money sites, use it for linking to your support sites as a fortification tool. Getting sandboxed is not a good thing.

I have been using a program called BlogCommentDemon for a little over a year. When I first got it, I used it for the intended purpose of finding “dofollow” blogs, and posting mass amounts of quality comments with rich anchor text and clean backlinks to whichever site I was marketing. Well, since that time, BCD has made several improvements to their software, rendering it one of the best software packages installed on my computer.

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If you are new to the world of Search Engine Optimization, let me tell you about the importance of linkbuilding. Linkbuilding is more critical than ANY onsite optimization, don’t let anyone tell you different. Sure onsite optimization is important, but it’s actually about 5 percent of the big picture of SEO. The main ingredient that matters is linkbuilding.

Creating backlinks to any website is a tedious task. You have to email site owners, submit to directories, manually submit links to social bookmarking sites, comment on blogs, and so on. Sometimes, building 1,000 backlinks can take weeks. There are programs that automate the process that run the risk of getting your site banned permanently from Google. There are some great semi-automated software packages, but they are very expensive, and lack the speed of professional level linkbuilding packages.

There is a solution to every problem listed above. It’s called Social Bookmarking Demon. It’s a very inexpensive linkbuilding program. Social Bookmarking Demon can literally give you thousands of links in just a few days.

My favorite feature of social bookmarking demon is the site crawl feature. You enter a URL, it crawls your entire site, and submits every page of your website to social bookmarking services. This is great because it helps to ensure that every page of your site is indexed in the search engines. Plus, it will help you build pagerank. You can also add your own social bookmarking sites into the list. It’s great.

Social Bookmarking Demon offers a 60 day money back guarantee. You should try it!

Ok, so a few months ago, Google penalized me and I dropped from PR3, down to PR1. I don’t know why it happened, maybe I lost some links or something, but who cares. I am now back to PR3 and I’m a little confused. It’s been about 6 months, and I’m back where I began, with little or no new links.

My concern/question is this: Back when my site dropped from PR3 to PR1, I was aggressively obtaining links from other bloggers and directories. Once the reduction happened, I focused my linkbuilding efforts on other projects, and basically ignored my blog (aside from writing new posts and socializing them). I integrated several new plugins for ping.fm, Twitter, and a few others to notify the blogosphere of my updates. So needless to say, my blog has still been getting a buttload of traffic, which I like, it’s social media traffic, which I love; however, what I am trying to do is maintain and increase Google PR, but it’s pretty much impossible to do. Is it best to just do things the same way I am right now, or should I still be aggressively building links?

There are a few reasons why I think I was hit in the first place. I probably had links coming from spammy blogs, or spammy directories. I also installed the dofollow plugin, which caused PR to be passed from my homepage to other sites, so that could have impacted my overall PR. I also shifted the overall topical nature of my blog from being “All about web design and SEO” to “the adventures of Nick Norris.” So I think I may have become less of an authority in my niche. All of these reasons are possible and probable, but none of them bother me.

I think that Google PR is way overrated, and I don’t think it really proves anything; however, when you have good PR, it makes you look and feel cooler, and if you lose it, you look like a bum. Let’s hope that I can maintain my current PR and get it raised up to a PR5 before next year (wishful thinking, but don’t count me out).

I’m not going to lie to you: I am not a die-hard directory submission advocate; however, directory submissions are a critical part of search engine optimization. They may not be the highest quality links, but they are better than spammy links, and they are seen by most search engines as legit. The problem with directory listings, is that it takes a lot of them to make any impact on your rankings, and the process of submitting listings is rediculously boring. In most cases it takes a long time for your listing to be approved, that’s if it ever gets approved at all. I generally have between 1/5 to 1/10 get approval pretty quickly, but the remaining listings are chalked up as a waste of time.

As most companies feel the same way as I do, they normally opt for outsourcing, which can be a huge mistake in some cases. Don’t get me wrong, I think that outsourcing can save a great deal of money, and it can provide great benefits for the cost. There is a better way to do things. I recommend SubmitEaze. SubmitEaze is a program that was created for semi-automated directory submission. It makes life so easy.

SubmitEaze has a function called the Turbo Lister. This single feature is worth the cost of submiteaze.

Here’s how it works:

What SubmitEaze does now is pre-load (or cache) several directories in advance, so as soon as the ‘submit’ button is pressed to submit to one directory, SubmitEaze will attempt to immediately display the submission form for the next directory. In the meantime, the submission is being made to the directory in the background, and the directory list is then updated once the submission has been made.

In testing I’ve been able to submit to 10-15 directories per minute (I peaked out at 18), which is way better than submitting manually. In most directories, all I had to do was fill out the CAPTCHA, and some directories were CAPTCHA free, which means submission took less than 1 second.