seo

How Yoga helped me refresh my blog SEO knowledge

UPDATE (January, 2018): Apparently, pingback service is overwhelmed with automated blog posts which are becoming more and more common on the web, and as a consequence regular posts cannot always get real-time attention the way they used to.

I tried yoga in LPAC Chicago several years ago, and honestly, even though I went for a year, I wasn’t impressed. Recently I tried Bihar Yoga classes in Belgrade (Joga Beograd), and I must say that they are just incomparably better. Teacher Milan has M.D. and has also lived and studied yoga (and acupuncture) in India. Unlike most contemporary yoga instructors who superficially learn in a year or two how to teach, Milan has a deeper understanding of why and how each asana should be done, their sequences, pauses, etc. I liked these classes so much that I offered to help out with the site they didn’t have.

Even though unfinished, we decided to publish the site, just to start appearing on search engines. Site has been online for few days now, but there are two problems:

1. It is appearing very low on Google search results
2. It is not appearing at all on blog search results

First problem I kind of expected given the site is brand new. However, what surprises me is that it ranks low even for the domain name phrase query. In the past I noticed such thing happen only for quite competitive phrases. “Joga Beograd” without a detailed analysis didn’t seem to be such a competitive phrase.

Second problem however is much more interesting.

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I wrote before about the rel nofollow monstrosity. It seems Google guys did finally realize something is terribly wrong with their invention. What Google anti-SPAM engineer Matt Cutts told us the other day is this:

Instead of preventing a “PageRank leak” (read: pathologically saving every drop of the inbound linking credit that a site gets) as can be seen in this “rel NoFollow” article, Google decided to simply exclude the PageRank which is nofollowed from the equation, effectively, reducing the size of PageRank that circulates through the site (and the web). This will, by the way, introduce some global level disturbances in the page-rank matrix, one of the major algorithms in the google rankings (even thought the number of nofollowed links is less than 3 percent, as they mostly come from big sites).

Is this change good or bad?

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FINAL UPDATE: this turned out to be a false alarm! do not panic!! self-referential canonical link is fine, and doesn’t cause problems. You can still read the post and comments below to see how I got confused.

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So today I typed a very common word into the search engine — word and, and I wanted to see who ranks the first for such a common word, and to see why would someone be the first for the word and.

I was very pleasantly surprised as I discovered what seems to be a really very good site, and useful site, that among other things also talks about word and. What site would talk about word and? A site about grammar!

Not being native english speaker, I appreciate such a good online resources.

Anyhow, you will notice that word ‘and’ in its title doesn’t have … how would I say it… a fundamental meaning. It is there simply to connect two words, and title may as well be as good without it:

Guide to Grammar. Guide to Writing.

Guide to Grammar in Writing.

or some other variation. Words grammar and writing often occur near each other without word and. For example, ‘proper use of grammar in writing…’ (btw. I am aware there may be a few grammar mistakes inmy posts — I didn’t practice English grammar since high school).

this is the top site.

However, you will notice that next few results fundamentally require word ‘and’ in their titles.
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Google searches and the number of results they give on October 28, 2008.

chicago developer about 414,000

chicago web developer about 72,100,000

chicago web designer about 9,110,000

chicago designer about 439,000

Can you solve this puzzle? Why more specific queries give more results when they should give less?! Why are there more of civil engineers, than (all) engineers? Why are there more chicago web developers than (all) chicago developers?

I am curious to know your hypothesis that can ‘explain’ above results.

Update:

Since no one replied so far, I will give my hypothesis:
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This simplified model is a nice introduction: Vector Space Model.

More food for thought: similarity measures and original Google architecture.

(for people who don’t know, ‘nofollow’ is a word inside a link telling search engine not to give any credit to that link. why would anyone use it? to discourage spam.)

Many people wrote about this topic, but I want to focus on something that others did not dedicate enough attention to.

People increasingly use social sites, and sites that are built by user contributions. There are so many great things that resulted from this (one of my favorite reference sources is Wikipedia which is built by millions of users). However, there are some serious consequences caused by the introduction of ‘nofollow’ that many people are not aware of.

1. Internet is rapidly going thru a PageRank concentration process (equivalent to real world capitalization where few people own most capital). Continue reading »