We just confirmed that google has been updating toolbar pagerank and backlinks, and it has been just over 3 months since the last update.

Since pagerank is one of the most important factors to determine the position of a site in the google search results, you may notice some change of your keywords performance as well.

We also found some interesting updates:

1. CNN.com has a pagerank of 10 (People show respect to the online news industry now )
2. Twitter.com has a pagerank of 9 (It deserves it, doesn’t it? )
3. Wordpress.com has a pagerank of 9 (Well, It takes a long time climbing up from pagerank 8 )
4. Wikipedia.org has a pagerank of 9 (Hmm.. Highest rank for human editing websites ever)
5. XiaoNei.com has a pagerank of 7 (It is a clone of Facebook )
6. Yammer.com has a pagerank of 6 (It went up from pagerank 2 )
7. W3Schools.com has a pagerank of 8 (Google punished this website for paid footer links, but it just went up again now )

Google now allows us to reorder and annotate search results. If you log into google account, you can see 3 buttons next to each search result, including: Promote, Remove and Comment. But, any changes you made will ONLY be saved into your Google account and won’t affect others, at least for now.

Google obviously understand the beauty and power of human-editing community (e.g. Wikipedia, DMOZ), and they now encourage their massive user base to contribute to the search engine. Although Google haven’t directly linked their search algorithm with this new feature yet, they might do that in the future if they are able to collect solid and substentcial evidence to show human-editing leads to better search quality.

Microsoft today launched SearchPerks, which gives users points when they use msn live search, and then the points can be redeemed for all sorts of rewards.

The new CashBack programme encourages people to use Live Search,  and they believe it will work in terms of increasing market share of online search.

To participate the SearchPerks, you have to download a special browser add-on, and you must use Internet Explorer. So, Microsoft is trying to kill three birds with one stone:

1. To get more Live Search users
2. To get more IE users
3. To have a better understanding of what people are searching for

We just noticed that another large PageRank and backlinks update taking place in the Google Toolbar. It has been just over 2 months since last PageRank update. We’ve found that many google competitors’ websites PageRank increased quit a lot, including: cuil.com, fireeagle.yahoo.net, delicious.com, maps.live.com and many others.

Google uses PageRank to identify the importance of web pages. Although there are more than a hundred parameters affecting google search results, PageRank is still one of the most critical factors.

There is a fundermental rule about advertising – you have to highlight your product in the ads. But, the new Microsoft PR story, which aired tonight, didn’t even mention the brand or any of their products.

I believe that they are trying to send out a message to explain how they have connected with over a billion people. However, the whole ads just make me feel that they should’ve/could’ve/would’ve connected with real people but they didn’t.

Here is the long uncut version:

Are you looking for a place to ……..

• Get your startup founded and get the snowball rolling;
  
• Get yourself a mentor who will see your business from a different perspective;
  
• Get significant media attention (VCs, fellow entrepreneurs and press).

TechCrunch50 (once a year)

1. Number of applicants: 1000+ groups.
2. Number of accepted groups: 50+.
3. Founding: ?.

DEMO (3 times a year)

1. Number of applicants: 1000+ groups.
2. Number of accepted groups: 70+.
3. Founding: ?.

Y Combinator (twice a year)

1. Number of applicants: ?.
2. Number of accepted groups: 20.
3. Founding: $5000 + $5000n, where n is the number of participating founders (i.e. 2 founders get $15,000, 3 get $20,000).

SeedCamp (once a year)

1. Number of applicants: 400+ groups.
2. Number of accepted groups: 5.
3. Founding: Up to EURO 50,000.

TechStars (once a year)

1. Number of applicants: 300+ groups.
2. Number of accepted groups: 10.
3. Founding: Up to $15,000.

Have you noticed there were some changes in the Google PageRank toolbar during this weekend (July 25th and 26th 2008)? I have seen some changes of many sites PR, especially for new sites. It has been 150 days since the last Toolbar PR export (February 26th 2008), but I am not sure weather it is a major update or just a minor tweak this time. 

Jason

1. Google Trends – search patterns and trends.
2. xinureturns – search engines, social bookmarking results aggregation.
3. quantcast – Internet ratings
4. alexa – traffic and changes
5. analytics – keywords / traffic source / visitors and more
6. compete – advertisers like reports from compete
7. search-directory – categories search tool

I’d like to say a massive thank you to the guys developing these fantastic search engine optimization tools, which make our life much easier.

Matt

Online advertising is all about conveying a simple idea to your potential customers as quick as you can. Time is precious in the age of information overload. So, you have to get your concise message to the targeted audience in an effective way, which doesn’t make them think and eager to hear more.

Lessons learned from my experience:

1. Understand the habits of your targeted customers. For example, what websites do they visit on a regular basis? What are their common interests? What do they say about your competitors?
2. Tell your customers how you’re going to solve their problems. Make sure people understand what values they are expected to get, no matter how you’re trying to reach them.
3. The ads / messages should be driven by keywords for SEO sake. i.e. 5% to 8% of the content should be the keywords themself.
4. Tell the bloggers why their readers should be interested in your topic.