Custom Search Results

So I got my first taste of notoriety in the world of search engine optimization. Albeit anonymous, and on a site only my fellow SEOers read... now that I think about it I wouldn't consider it notoriety. Anyways, I check out Webmasterworld.com on a daily basis and signed up for an account because it wouldn't let me read as many posts as I was without signing up. I posted something for the first time the other day about how Google was letting people know right in the search results pages when a particular search was customized. Pretty much everyone had known that being logged into your Google account would skew results based on what pages you had viewed in the past... but for a while now I've noticed that certain things would come up in different positions depending on who's computer I was using (while not logged in). Customized results are a pain in the ass when your job is to know exactly where your site ranks for certain keywords and how to improve them. If it looks to you like you're number one for every keyword you care about customized results can suck. Long story short one of my favorite SEO blogs SeoRoundTable.com noticed my post and did an entire article about it that wound up on their homepage. Nerdgasm.

Here's the article: Google Provides More Information about Personalized Results

Google PageRank Update

So here's one of those things that only people in the search engine optimization world care about. Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, announced yesterday that Google would be updating their toolbar Pagerank. If you have the Google toolbar you may or may not know what Pagerank is, but long story short it's a great estimator of whether or not a page on the web you're looking at is actually relevant or just some well done spam site. Here's the blog post:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-pagerank-update/