SEO, Website Content Optimization
& Software Development

This week has seen widespread speculation in the online community over an update to Google’s PageRank which seems to be taking place at the moment, whereby a number of high profile websites have seen their PageRank drop dramatically.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, PageRank is an approximate measure of a site’s importance based on the number and quality of inbound links it receives. The theory is that important ‘authority’ sites will receive more and better links than sites with less valuable content: high authority = high PageRank. If you have it enabled on your Internet browser’s toolbar, you can see a site’s PageRank as that little green bar representing values from 0 to 10.

(more…)

Techcrunch reported yesterday that traffic was being redirected from Google to Chinese search engine Baidu.

There is speculation that the move, which also affected MSN and Yahoo, was carried out by the Chinese government in response to the United States awarding of a Congressional Medal of Honor to the Dalai Lama on Wednesday.

However, today there was some confusion over whether the redirect had actually happened - blocks and redirects are never commented on by the Chinese goverment - and several reports, notably from Infoworld suggested that the redirect story had been fabricated.

We can confirm that the redirect really did take place - at least for a while.

(more…)

According to a BBC News article out today, Google powered 37 billion of 61 billion searches in August - over half of ALL global search requests.

Unless you’ve been otherwise engaged for the better part of the last decade, Google’s dominance of search will come as no surprise to you. What might come as a surprise to some will be to see that a company called Baidu accounted for an impressive 52% more search requests than the $500+ billion Microsoft Corporation and its related search engines (MSN / Live Search).

Here’s the list of August’s Top 5 most popular search engines worldwide:
(as per comScore)

(more…)