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Google Closes at 666 – Perhaps They Are Evil

Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t Be Evil.” Ironically, their closing stock price today was 666 to the penny. You can take a look yourself any any stock quote tool (use GOOG for the ticker symbol), or check out the Google Finance screenshot below:

Google 666

I doubt it is the first time a stock closed at 666.00, but it is certainly more rare as most stocks over the past couple decades split long before they reach that number. Even gold closed at 666.00 early this year. I’m not superstitious, but I’m sure a number of investors taking a look at their stocks tonight will be a bit unsettled. Read this article about google posting benefits too.

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Google’s PageRank Drop – SEOs Dissapoint Me

There’s been a flood of activity in the SEO community talking about PageRank drops and every assessment I’ve read continues to ignore the bigger question. Did the affected sites lose search engine ranks?

My fellow SEOs have long been preaching how Google Toolbar PageRank (PR) is fairly inaccurate and that PageRank is only one element, among hundreds, of Google’s algorithm. Then when Google dials down the PR on a number of sites our industry goes nuts. Wait a minute – didn’t we say PR isn’t that important? Maybe it really is. Or maybe it really is for a certain set of sites: those who sell links based on PR.

From the list of the sites affected, it appears the PR drops targeted mostly sites that sell links or were strongly interconnected with these sites. For all we know, it is simply a simple visual adjustment – a very effective tactic to hit link sellers where it hurts most, but without hurting innocent sites in the cross-fire. Though an innocent site might be concerned that their PR dropped, if their SERP ranks haven’t changed then it doesn’t really affect them because they aren’t selling links based off their PR.

So among the list of site that have been affected by the PR dial-down, regardless as to whether they sell links or not, I must ask: have any actually seen SERP rank drops?

For example: Search Engine Guide is reported to have dropped from a PR 7 to a PR 4, but when I do a Google search for “search engine,” I see them ranked #8 (ironically, Google doesn’t even rank itself on page 1).

If you work at, or have been tracking keyword ranks for any of the following affected sites, please report whether or not you have seen actual drops in rank:

Washington Post (PR7 to PR5)
Forbes (PR7 to PR5)
Seattle Times (PR6 to PR4)
Charlotte Observer (PR6 to PR4)
Sun Times (PR7 to PR5)
San Francisco Chronicle (PR7 to PR5)
New Scientist (PR7 to PR5)
Engadget (PR7 to PR5)
Copy Blogger (PR6 to PR4)
AutoBlog (PR6 to PR4)
problogger.net (PR6 to PR4)
www.tuaw.com (PR6 to PR4)
www.seroundtable.com (PR7 to PR4)
www.searchengineguide.com (PR7 to PR4)
www.searchenginejournal.com (PR7 to PR4)
www.johnchow.com (PR6 to PR4)
andybeard.eu (PR5 to PR3)
www.blogherald.com (PR6 to PR4)
(or other sites affected)



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Check Your SEO Skillz

I’m a bit late to the party, but I’ve been a bit out of the SEO world this past month (vacation, filming, and upcoming announcement. I recently took the SEOmoz SEO quiz, which was kind of fun since I haven’t taken an SEO quiz in such a long time. I don’t agree 100% with all the answers and felt there are better questions to test someone’s SEO knowledge, but found it to be the best SEO quiz I’ve seen to date.

I guess I did pretty well:


SEO RockStar - 175%

Try out the quiz yourself.

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Detailed Google Search Referrer Data

Found some interesting nuggets when I decided to narrow in on Google referrer data (as reported by Omniture) from one particular high volume keyword.

The word was “lasagna” and when I dug into the Google data, I noticed some interesting things. Google shares the following data in the referrer URL. I compare each search type to the standard “lasagna” search in google (without quotes) to protect the actual traffic volume for the high-ranked website.

Google Searcher Keyword Variations:

Standard lasagna search: 100%
(this is the search I base the rest of the data on)

lasagna misspelled & clicked on google did you mean link: 74%
(this was much higher than I anticipated – people probably ignored the “g” in lasagna).

Lasagna search: 8%
(I guess some people figure capitalizing the first letter will get them better results)

lasagna_ : 4%
(the underscore denotes a space after the search term – I guess some people can’t help but drop their thumbs down on that nice big spacebar)

Google Searcher Behaviors and Platforms:

lasagna search, but clicked search button: 40%
(looks like most people hit enter, but some take the time to click the search button)

standard lasagna search via Firefox: 19%
(firefox users continue to grow and Google likes tracking them)

standard lasagna search via iGoogle: 6%
(looks like some people are using iGoogle as their homepage)

Google Non-U.S. Data

UK standard lasagna search: 9.5%
Google UK misspelled did you mean correction: 34.4%
Google UK lasagna search, but clicked search button: 2.5%
Looks like our friends from the UK need to work on spelling. Misspelled version is 4 times more common than the correct spelling!

Google Canada standard lasagna search: 23.6%
Google Canada misspelled did you mean correction: 15.1%
Google Canada lasagna search, but clicked search button: 8.2%
Our friends from Canada are a little less mousey (hit enter instead) and slightly better spellers than Americans.

We can’t draw too many conclusions from this data, but it does highlight some of the data you can get from looking at your referrer data more closely. I invite you to spot check a couple terms that you rank for and share your findings in the comments.

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Speaking at DomainRoundTable

For those attending the DomainRoundTable conference in Seattle, be sure introduce yourself (throw your name in the comments and I’ll keep an eye out for you). I’ll be speaking in the SEO sessions. I’m excited to attend because I think domainers & SEOs could gain & learn a lot from each other.

The combination of a domainer’s assets with the skills of an SEO could be very lucrative for both parties. Why settle for $1,000 of ad revenue a month in direct type-in traffic, when you could build an SEO-friendly content site that will eventually pull in $1,000,000 a month?

Jay has been listing many of the very interesting domains that will be auctioned off on the domaintools blog.