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Frequently Asked Questions About SEO

Many companies who have never worked with an SEO consultant before, or who have only had unsatisfactory experiences, often ask questions when it is too late. This Frequently Asked Questions document reflects questions that many people ask in SEO forums after they have been approached by an SEO consultant or after they have had one or more bad experiences.

  1. What is PageRank? How does it affect my rankings?
  2. PageRank is an evaluation tool developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the 1990s for assessing the importance of Web pages. Drawing upon academic research literature for inspiration, Page and Brin wrote a paper proposing that Web page links could be used to identify important documents. The methodology calculates a probability distribution, estimating how likely a person would be to arrive at any document simply by clicking on links in random fashion.

    The PageRank algorithm had flaws and vulnerabilities but Page and Brin combined it with a more traditional Information Retrieval scoring system that evaluates on-page content to design what became the Google search engine. Page and Brin subsequently proposed the use of a "proxy" for their PageRank that assesses a Web page's value on a 0-to-10 scale. The proxy has been modified more than once, and Google appears to use one version in its tool bar, another version in its directory, and a third version in its search API (application programming interface).

    Although PageRank has never actually determined how pages should be ranked in search results (except in the directory), many SEO consultants have wrongly believed for years that PageRank was important for rankings. Unfortunately, there are sill FAQs and tutorials that wrongly advocate the use of the Toolbar PageRank proxy value for use in search engine optimization.
  3. What is TrustRank? Why is it so important?
  4. TrustRank is a methodology proposed by Yahoo! and Stanford University computer scientists as a replacement for traditional PageRank. The TrustRank methodology utilizes a core set of hand-picked, trusted Web sites to start a crawl of the Web. The researchers subsequently published a follow up methodology that they claimed was more reliable than TrustRank.

    Because Google filed a trademark application for the word TrustRank, many people incorrectly concluded that Google had implemented the Yahoo! TrustRank algorithm. What is currently known (based on revelations from Google employees) is that Google does measure trust in some way and that it has put filters into place which help it evaluate which sites can be trusted.
  5. What is a trusted Web site? How can my site earn trust?
  6. Google, MSN, Ask, and Yahoo! all determine trust according to their secret methodologies. But in general it appears that trust is like a flag assigned to each Web page. Once a page has earned enough trust, the flag is turned on (so to speak) and links from the page are considered to be more important. All the search engines appear to still be using something like PageRank to enhance their relevance scoring, but they seem to be relying upon their trust factors to determine which pages can confer PageRank and link anchor text to other pages through links.

    The only way we can be sure your site becomes a trusted site is for your site to acquire inbound links from other sites that are already trusted. However, a Web page can lose its trusted status for various reasons. One reason may be that the search engines have identified paid links on the page. These are not the Javascript-based ads that are served by search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. These are normal, static hypertext links that the Web site operators have placed on their pages for a fee.
  7. How important are links to search engine rankings?
  8. In the greater scheme of things, links are not normally very important to search engine rankings. Each search engine evaluates linkage in its own way, of course, and one engine may place greater emphasis on links than another. But many SEOs wrongly believe that search results must be manipulated through linkage, and they restrict their optimization only to link building campaigns. This type of search engine optimization is very risky and inefficient. You can never be fully sure of which links actually help.

    You can use links to achieve high search engine positioning. But there are more productive, more efficient ways to achieve those results. Link building is best reserved for improving your site's crawl frequency and earning trust. Of course, some links bring in traffic all by themselves. These types of links are extremely valuable and should naturally be sought out if available.
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