Paid Links & Buying Links

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Buying links or paying for links (which pass PageRank) has been officially forbidden by Google & is against their TOS.

That means that any links you buy or sell with the intention of gaming the search engines can potentially damage your site or even get it removed from the search engine's index.

Buying links isn't necessarily prohibited, Google rightly state that it is "a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results." and that "links purchased for advertising should be designated as such."

There are a few ways to do this but the most effective is to use the rel="nofollow" tag to tell the search spiders not to follow that particular link & not to pass any PageRank (reputation) along with it.

So, stop building sites just to gain PR & therefore to sell links & bring your online money making efforts into the 21st century!

Don't believe me? Here is Google's official stance.

Number Google Search Results - How To

Individually Number Google Search Results

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So you know how to increase Google search results to 100. But what use is that if you only know that the site you're looking for in three-quarters of the way down the page?

This requires no additional plugins or software ... we're just creating a bookmark.

Individually Number Google Search Results for Internet Explorer

• Create a bookmark to any page. Name it something useful like (Number Google Results).
  


• Open Internet Explorer (IE)
• Select Favourites > Add to Favourites
• Right click the Favourite and choose Properties
• Input the following code in the URL box (it may give you a warning about Javascript - just ignore it).

To use, just search for something on Google then open the favourite menu and click the bookmark you created in Step 1.

Individually Number Google Search Results for Firefox

• Create a bookmark to any page. Name it something useful like (Number Google Results).
  


• Open FireFox (FF)
• Choose Bookmark this Page (or use Ctrl + D)
  
• Select Favourites > Add to Favourites
• Right click the Favourite and choose Properties
• Input the following code in the Location box.

To use, just search for something on Google then open the favourite menu and click the bookmark you created in Step 1.

Why PageRank Doesn't Matter

Why Google PageRank Doesn't Matter

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What is PageRank (PR)?

Google's pagerank is a measure created by Google of a sites trustworthiness in the eyes of Google.

It is important to realise that PageRank applies to each individual page on a site & is not a sitewide value. One page can be PR 5 and another could have no PR.

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

That is why you'll hear search engine professionals talking about how a single link from an authority (high PR) site can be worth more than lots of links for a low PR site.

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What? Two Versions?

Google has two versions of PageRank, a publically displayed metric and an internal value that they do not release to the public.

The public version is only updated once every 3 months or so (there's even rumours that it only gets updated once a year).

Therefore the public toolbar PR is almost always out of date by up to 3 months.

That's reason #1 why your PR doesn't matter.

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Rankings & PageRank

It is well known in the search marketing industry that good (high) pagerank doesn't equate to good (high) rankings. A PR 0 site can easily outrank a PR4 or PR5 site (and above).

Therefore concentrating on building PageRank in the hope that it will automatically convert into higher rankings for your keyphrases is a waste of time.

That's reason #2 why PR doesn't matter.

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Pagerank alone doesn't pay the bills, it doesn't generate enquiries, sales or conversions. A little green bar will never make your business or website a success, no matter how optimistic you are.

A great site with a PR0 doesn't make it a bad site. It may be a new site, have had recent server problems (downtime) or the toolbar itself may be reporting bad data.

As has been said many times before, concentrate on building quality content that people will want to share with others & build your inbound links to get rankings that bring traffic, the PageRank will follow ... but if it doesn't ... so what?!!?!

PS. You don't just have to take my word for it, most SEO experts agree on this. Here, and here and even here.

Location and Previous Searches: Affect on Google Results

How does Location & Previous Search History Affect Google Results?

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If Google (and other search engines) know where you're located, they can (and will try) to display more relevant results based on that location.

For example if you're searching for pizza shops or plumbers or car dealers & you're located in London, you're going to want ones that are nearby and not a pizza shop in Edinburgh.

If you sign in to your Google account (Youtube is obviously included in this) and you have previously searched for MS and been looking for pages and information about multiple sclerosis then you're likely to want to see the same sort of result should you search for MS again. Rather than seeing results for Microsoft or manuscript or milestone.

Of course, there is the option to opt out of these services and clear your browser history and cookies but most people will find that providing Google with your location is a small price to pay for much more targeted results.

Additional Links in Google - Sub links - Sitelinks

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Google Sitelinks - Sub links

See More Results from Google (not 10) - How To

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More Google Results - SEO Thunder