PageRank sculpting is an SEO method of controlling your websites allocation of PageRank throughout your web pages. PageRank sculpting is based on simple logic. Previously all you needed to do was add the rel=”nofollow”  tag to a link pointing at a web page that had little use to you in terms of search engine optimisation (such as a shopping basket or a contact us form), then you didn’t dilute any of your PageRank to that page.

In simple terms PageRank sculpting helps divide PageRank amongst all the pages that are most beneficial for your website and excludes others.

However on June 15th, Matt Cutts of Google in his own personal blog stated that PageRank sculpting wasn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank and that he personally wouldn’t recommend this technique. Cutts continued by saying that Google has recently changed its algorithms and website owners should let their PageRank flow freely within their site.

He suggested that website owners should generate great content that will attract links and make sure their website’s architecture is crawlable for both humans and search engines.

Matt Cutts’ views on PageRank sculpting have definitely got the SEO community talking and rethinking their policies on the use of PageRank sculpting.

Not since the introduction of the canonical URL tag have we seen such a fundamental shift in SEO best practices. So “is PageRank sculpting really dead?” is now the question on everybody’s mind.

More about this?
Read Matt Cutt’s post

Toshiba has appointed search and social media specialist White Hat Media for a campaign to develop optimised content for its new blogging website; ToshibaLife.com.

The electronics manufacturer launched the site to build and engage with a new online audience that its main brochure-led website, uk.computers.toshiba-europe.com, doesn’t currently reach. ToshibaLife publishes blogs to help aid consumers pre and post-purchase; promoting the technology behind Toshiba products and advising on how to get the best out of them. The blogs also include the latest news and information on broader innovations and technologies.

Traffic to ToshibaLife is being generated solely online through search activity. White Hat Media will optimise ToshibaLife by helping to produce credible and engaging content.

An online discussion forum on ToshibaLife allows consumers to comment on blogs. Users need to register, but the site will shortly release a new tool where anyone can comment without being logged in, to encourage higher participation.

“Driving traffic through quality and user-focused content is absolutely key for brands,” said Jeremy Spiller, MD of White Hat Media. “We are very pleased to be appointed by Toshiba on this project. Our objective is to assist Toshiba in building a lasting relationship with an engaged and enthusiastic audience.”

Toshiba eventually plans to create awareness of ToshibaLife among its customers via in-product marketing material.

For further information, please contact:
Claire Armitt
flannel
01273 779449 / 07985 297842
claire.armitt@no-flannel.com

On Monday 15th June I was watching the evening news on TV showing a peaceful demonstration against the elections’ results in Iran. However peaceful, this demonstration flared up in panic and anger when police forces started to shoot in the crowd, killing a young man.

What does Twitter say?

I went straight to my computer to find out whether twitter echoed the events. Yes, as everyone knows now, it did. Searching for “Iranian elections”, I found out a number of related topics thanks to the so useful hashtag, and saved #Iranianelection as a permanent search.

Reading Iranian Elections tweets I also found out that Twitter had been planning maintenance downtime. Unfortunate timing. Many tweets were asking for the maintenance to be rescheduled in consideration of the current Iranian circumstances. Without a second thought, I re-tweeted one of these messages, identifiable with the #nomaintenance. I have not heard since of Twitter services being subject to any potential downtime.

What does the BBC do?

In the West, traditional media have acknowledged the role played by social media in the Iranian crisis. TVs broadcast footage recorded on mobile phones and posted on YouTube, whilst the BBC appeals to Iranian citizens to share their information and pictures through the BBC website.

No matter how hard not-so-democratic governments try to lock up the Internet, and ban freedom of speech from traditional media, social media have been propelled to the place of democratic essential.

As one of the tweets I read nicely put it, “with growth and fame comes social responsibility”. So with the Iranian crisis, have Social Media moved on from being “just stuff shared” with friends to a level of credibility once thought to be the monopoly of traditional broadcast media? This would undoubtedly be a sign of maturity.

For an interesting timeline of Iranian events in social media, see Mashable.

Recently I’ve been looking around at the different search engines on the internet hoping and believing that there was more to search than the big three of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Having looked at the very serious Wolfram Alpha a little while ago and more recently the oddly named Duck Duck Go, I have now been alerted to Hunch.

Maybe it’s just coincidental after the release of the new Microsoft search engine Bing labelling itself as a “decision engine”, but that is exactly what Hunch describes itself to be as well. The only difference maybe is that Hunch will really help you make those decisions.

The idea of Hunch is that you type in a question that you would like help answering and then it will ask you a further set of leading questions to decipher what it thinks the correct result or answer is. It could be described as an advice engine as it tries to guess what it thinks you would like and then offers several options.

Hunch is based around its own community who create their own questions and answers to supply the engines database. Then using its own special algorithm developed specifically for Hunch it seeks to answer the questions that are being posed. According to their website, the Hunch algorithm always asks “what can I ask next which will lead to the best possible result?”

There is no doubt that it will be a continuously evolving search engine as more information is inputted into its data banks but for now it still manages to provide a fun searching experience. In fact it will often leave you wondering why you hadn’t thought of that question earlier in your own decision making process.

The site is well laid out in the obligatory dominant white background and simple text that shows your answers in a clear and neat format. Easy to navigate around with some good information on how it all works and use of images, Hunch delivers aesthetically a very pleasing search experience.

It is also a search engine that can become quite addictive and I soon found myself inputting in all kinds of questions to see how they would turn out. The answers to a query generally produce a wild card answer as well, something from left field that you probably hadn’t thought about which adds to the fun.

Part of my research led me to type in, “What should I have for lunch today?”. It started off asking me questions such as; “Will I be eating at my desk? Am I vegetarian? Will I be partaking in any activity later in the day?”.

After a couple more questions it decided that a sandwich would be the ideal choice for me. That was all the confirmation I needed. As the people at Hunch say, “It is a search engine that will help you make smart decisions.”

Coming out almost as soon as the publicity for Bing went into full swing Hunch is taking a piggy back ride on the exposure about decision engines which should be a great assist for them to start off with.

Duck Duck Go may have gone under the radar since its launch in September 2008 but it is in fact an internet search engine that has had some positive feedback from its users. I thought I would take a look at this new search engine, if only to give my eyes a break from the usual suspects’ home pages and logos.

Duck Duck Go bases itself around being a search engine that will provide you with the results you need whilst wiping out the clutter that can often get in the way of a regular search query. Using its own web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and information taken partly from Wikipedia, it is hoping to make search more relevant.

On first thoughts it doesn’t do much for me in the way of looks and design. Starting with the strange name you are half expecting that the style from there on in would be a little different. The pages look like they have been put together in a children’s art class and the text could do with being tightened up to make it look more professional.

It works by providing a step by step process that starts with search summaries that then lead you on to the correct set of sites for your query that they say, “Will remove the clicking backward and forward normally associated with search results.”  Duck Duck Go CEO Gabriel Weinberg explained that “Duck Duck Go uses semantic technology to identify topics within queries and will adjust its results accordingly.”

For my first search I typed in my home town Brighton. After clicking the Brighton I wanted it gave me several options about the city from the local council website to the recently finished Brighton festival website, this keeps it in line with its stance of offering the most official page first of any search.

In all, the first sets of results offer a good choice of what is presently standard and popular in the city without having to search too long and hard. If I was visiting Brighton for the first time I feel as though it would give enough good advice to get me going in the city. Saying that, I still feel as though it is a service Google, Bing and Yahoo certainly offer just as well, if not considerably better.

After putting in several other search queries it does offer some good results and covers most of the bases you would expect from a search engine plus it knows when phrases can have different meanings and alerts you to this. There is a cool Icon bar where you can click on the logo of a major company’s website and it will perform the same search for you on their site and provide their results. It is interesting to see how your search query is referenced in various websites around the world. There are a few obvious misses like no RSS feeds link but hopefully this will all be rectified as time goes by with the site still being so new.

So if you want to try something different from the big guns of search then you could do worse than taking a look at Duck Duck Go. It may look as quirky as it sounds but it does offer some good information.

After having their value underestimated by investment firms in the US, Facebook has looked to Russia for its latest investment opportunity. They have arranged a $200 million investment from Russian holding company Digital Sky Technologies.

Where the US firms saw Facebook overvalued at $10 billion the Russian firm see Facebook as a prime candidate to make use of monetization models that are popular with Russian social networking sites. Facebook only ranks as the 59th most popular site in Russia with only 200,000 users.

Digital Sky is the sole investor in vKontakte which is Russia’s most popular social network site. Chief Executive of digital Sky Yuri Milner says that, “vKontake is monetized significantly better than Facebook and we believe that Facebook can be monetized to a much greater extent.”  

Facebook plans on using the money only if the company grows faster than expected or wants to add new talent to its workforce. There was said to be a $3 Billion difference in the valuation of Facebook between Facebook executives and US private equity firms.

Twitter has decided to offer verified accounts after experiencing problems with the supposed account of well known baseball manager Tony La Russa in the United States.

Worried about users impersonating people on Twitter the service will start with public officials and famous people who are likely targets for this practice.

Twitter is currently in the middle of a lawsuit from La Russa after somebody impersonated him on the micro blogging site criticising some players.

Search Engine Land said that Twitter should be able to easily verify lots of accounts by providing automated verification in the way of unique meta tags or file names.

Reports vary on whether Twitter has settled the lawsuit but either way it will serve as a good wake up call to improve the Twitter service.

Some interesting new statistics regarding Twitter have emerged from The Harvard School of Business. Taking the results of 300,000 randomly selected Twitter users, it looked into how people were using the service and how it compares to social networking sites.

It has provided some statistics that might surprise a lot of people. Although Twitter seems to be everywhere and everyone seems to be “tweeting”, the truth is that 90% of all “tweets” are written by the top 10% most prolific writers.

The findings also show that males attract a lot more followers at this time. There isn’t a reason to explain this so it will be interesting to see how the figures develop in future years. 

Over half of people signed up to Twitter post a “tweet” only once every 74 days which shows there is still a huge room for growth in the service.

Days after revealing their plans for Google Wave the people at Google have unveiled their latest internet search tool, Google Squared. 

The aim of Google Squared is to provide all the answers you need for a search query that may have lots of different answers. On the Google blog using roller coasters as an example they go on to explain what it is essentially about. 

If you are interested in all aspects of roller coasters you would know that there are many different facts and figures relating to them. You might be looking to find the highest, the fastest or the one with the most loops for your next holiday. If you searched for these facts then you would have to conduct several different searches to find all the answers.

Google Squared will give you a list of all the different roller coasters available to ride with their specifications so you can make a decision on which roller coaster you would like to ride.

Google is aware that the tool is a long way from perfect so is designing it to be conversational so that you can respond to the results. You can change the results boxes to suit your needs and it will then look to find the answers for you.

If it doesn’t provide the results you are looking for first time then with some interaction it will attempt to work out what you are looking for in your next search.

It is currently only available in Google labs whilst they look to perfect it. There currently isn’t any information on how they decide which answers make the list.

Recently we have had Wolfram Alpha offering a comprehensive “computational” knowledge engine and Google Squared promising a simple way of pulling organised data from websites into a spreadsheet style format.

Now last week we have seen Microsoft’s Live Search engine evolve into what they are now calling their decision engine. Originally code-named Kumo and supported by Microsoft’s hefty marketing muscle, Bing has been launched.

After I got the reference to Chandler Bing from Friends out of my head and started to take this new search engine seriously, I started to realised that maybe we finally do have a contender to take on the search behemoth that is Google.

In its new advertising drive to promote Bing, Microsoft are promoting the fact that search is broken and that people are now suffering from search overload. The answer to this problem is not another search engine but Microsoft’s “decision” engine.
�
The first thing you’ll notice when you visit Bing is the lavish homepage. Bing displays a beautiful image of what appears to be a pristine shoreline peppered with small white yachts. Microsoft claims that Bing will deliver a more functional experience than any other search engine and will help you make smarter and faster decisions. The search results appear to be effective and accurate with related searches displayed on a left sidebar. One cool feature that Bing has are thumbnails of results for video searches which instantly play when you hover over them. This facility shows what can be done with modern browsers and fast networks.

Its impact on the search market has also started to become apparent. According to data issued by StatCounter, Bing has already grabbed 16.28 percent of the US search engine market meaning it has out performed Yahoo who came in third with 10.22 percent. Google still dominates this market with a 71.47 percent share. In the worldwide search engine market, Bing is also holding its own. Bing grabbed 5.62 percent of the market, squeaking past Yahoo, which has 5.13 percent. Google still dominate with 87.62 percent.

Regardless of how good Bing looks and how impressive its market share has become, I really do think the idea that search is broken and that people are suffering from search overload seems to be wishful thinking on Microsoft’s part or have Microsoft now built a real contender - a Google killer?

Realistically even if Bing gets it right and does offer a solid and reliable search product, the barriers to success posed by the search mammoth Google are enormous. Success is by no means guaranteed. Humans are creatures of habit and with Google’s dominance of the search market for the last 10 years; it will be a hard habit to break.

But never say never!! Google must have an Achilles heel? Bing may be able to succeed not through offering a better search engine (sorry I meant “decision” engine) than Google but by making money for other people. Google’s advertising programmes - Adwords and Adsense - have helped fuel its growth in the past. If Microsoft can find ways to generate advertising income via Bing for others then it may be able to have a great crack at taking more of Google’s controlling market share. Only time will answer this question, but new blood in the search market can only be a good thing for everyone!