November 13, 2006 Archives

In Google Sitemaps there is a statistic under stats/ crawl statistics that shows you "Your page with the highest PageRank." It looks like this for this site:

Now, several people are reporting that they have heard of or seen themselves, random pages being displayed in that report.

I suddenly see a change in my highest PR page as reported by Google Webmaster Tools. It used to be the homepage, obviously, until October 2006. One both months - October and November the pages shown as highest PR are what seems to be just random internal pages. The homepage is PR4 (down from long time PR5) and the October page is only PR1 and November page does not even have any PR at all according to the Toolbar.

For one of my verified sites, the report does not show at all. But for all the others, it seems like it works just fine.

Maybe this is showing a different, more current, PageRank value? I really do not know for sure.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A reader asked that I give the new Amazon PPC program some coverage, since there is a WebmasterWorld thread on it. The thread links to Gary's ResourceShelf post named What’s A ClickRiver? New Pay-Per-Click Sponsored Ad Program from Amazon and A9.

Clickriver Ads is an advertising program -- currently in beta -- that allows businesses to place sponsored links on Amazon.com®, next to search results and on product detail pages. Clickriver Ads presents a unique opportunity to advertise services and products that complement the selection on Amazon.com, an online marketplace with tens of millions of active customer accounts.

Clickriver Ads was created by A9.com®, a search technologies company based in Palo Alto, California. A9.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com.

Visit https://clickriver.com/advertiser/ for more information.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This week I think it is best to cancel the Search Pulse. Chris and I will be in sessions at WebmasterWorld's PubCon and it will conflict with our coverage schedule. So we will postpone this weeks show until next week.

We should have two weeks of coverage and conference coverage roundup for you on the November 21st edition.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks, how do you know if a search engine has penalized your site?

With most engines, the quickest method of checking that is to see if the engine has you in their index. How do you do that? Just do a site:www.domain.com command. Examples of those searches for this site:

• site:www.seroundtable.com at Google
• site:www.seroundtable.com at Yahoo! (redirects to Site Explorer)
• site:www.seroundtable.com at MSN (Live.com)
• inurl: www.seroundtable.com site:www.seroundtable.com at Ask.com

If no pages are found, you can assume something is wrong. If your site is very new, less than a month or so, then just wait and be patient (get more links). If it is Ask.com, they take longer than a month to get indexed. But if your site is old and it once was indexed in the search engines and you do not have any pages indexed now, then it may be a sign of a penalty.

If you exclude all site technical problems, the next thing you might want to do in Google's case is sign up with Google Sitemaps. They may show you enough detail to explain that you are banned and why... Or they may not.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.