Google Serving Personalized Results For Everyone

Christoph Cemper gives a great overview of Google’s Decision to provide personalized results for all searches. Should SEOs be worried?

Learn why Google Analytics is now illegal in Germany. Find out how many of the world’s websites now use Google Analytics and get up to date on Google’s new DNS services.

Christoph says don’t freak out, but should you?

Does Domain Registration Length Affect Search Rankings?

Domain registration length does seem to be a small factor when Google is trying to make up it’s mind where to rank your site in search results.

I’ve spent time reading snips of blogs, watching YouTube videos, and the only thing I can really determine is your might as well register the domain for 5 years and use a public registration. When you register a domain for a single year you generally renew the thing anyway.

It makes sense to me that Google might trust a domain a small bit more if it’s on a 5 year registration. Typically spammers will register a domain and burn it out (get blocked by blacklists, etc) within a few months, of course they use 1 year registrations…maybe not for long.

Contact me or drop a comment below if you have some hard facts on this, or can point me in a clearer direction.

Google PageRank Update

For the first time since June, Google has updated it’s public page rank utility.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page.

In other words, the more sites linking to you, the more page rank you accumulate. The amount you accumulate is completely based on the PageRank of the sites linking to you.

What’s my website’s PR?

You can easily check your PageRank at many free sites such as PRchecker.info

Google Caffeine Search Preview

Google Caffeine is born. Several Google engineers have been hard at work the past several months developing what may become Google’s next generation indexing/search platform, code named Caffeine. Google has touted the insane indexing speeds and accuracy of the new platform in recent press releases and several in-depth reviews are starting to show up around the web.

Google wants more feedback from professional SEOs and developers : See Google Caffeine in Action

My initial review is somewhat freighting as several of my front page listings (for terms like my name) have disappeared, while my social network areas (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) now rank much higher. While somewhat concerning, I’m optimistic this platform shift could cause the same type of headaches for SEO clients of our competitors, and drive new business to BlitzLocal. The key now is getting ahead of the curve with research and experimentation.

Video: SEO for Local Search

Rand Fishkin (founder seomoz) and David Mihm discuss Google’s location prominence score, local search results, and how Google uses information from local sites in your area to decide how important you are to your geography.  Watch this video to learn how to boost your site’s ranking within your town for the key terms and phrases that are most important for generating new sales.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – SEO for Local Search from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.