Nice little illistration of a query life cycle. 

In what takes less than a second Google has to search 26 billion documents, find those of which are most relevant and order them by 200 ranking criteria to give you the perfect result.

http://ppcblog.com/how-google-works/

This is a good look under the hood and illistrates how complex search and PPC can really be. 

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Domain Authority (DA) was the much talked about metric of 2009.  Post Vince-update, everyone has been trying to conceptualise and measure what "domain authority" really is and what it means to your rankings. 


SEO Moz have done a pretty good job of merging trust (TrustRank/Moz Trust) and popularity (PageRank/MozRank) to create it's own 100 point scale domain authority (DM). DM has the strongest correlation of any link metric with the SERPs beating out yahoo links, unique linking domains and Google own PageRank. 


Here's a video of how it's worked out.


http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics

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must try harder

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January has been a very busy month......

In the wake of the rumours that Microsoft/Yahoo were going to abolish the trusted link analsis mainstay that is Yahoo Site Explorer.  SEO Moz have spotted a potential gap in the market and have rolled out:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Open Site Explorer is powered by Moz's Linkscape index and leverages the Moz metrics MozRank and MozTrust also with a load of other cool analytical elements.

Building an index of the web is a mamouth and not to mention expensive task. Producing a link analysis tool of this depth puts many paid for services to shame. It will be interesting to see how SEOMoz can turn this into a commercial opportunity.

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Posts will be a little slow this week as I'm not very well - party season has taken affect (!).

2010 will be much more substantial.

XML sitemaps are a great way to improve indexing, we know that. But, what if you have a really large site >100k?

You can't have more than 50k pages within a single sitemap so you've got to split your site into sections and implement a multiple XML sitemap strategy.

To do so you need to look beyond the free sitemap generators that have a 500 URL limit and download a dedicated sitemap generator - I'd recommend GSite Crawler for functionality, but perhaps not for speed.

1. Split your site into relevant sections - homepage+top level categories, departments, products sundry pages.
2. Create an XML sitemap for each of the sections.
   
3. Adjust , and settings to reflect page changes and importance (n.b. remember priority settings are relative to your site).
4. Create a sitemap index file that links to your multiple sitemaps - view example
   
5. Upload via Google Webmaster Tools.
   

It's worth remembering the focus here is on getting you deep pages indexed. A web crawl should find and index the majority of your top pages so it's worth spending extra time on planning and implementing product sitemaps that prioritises areas of the site where your sites architecture may not complement.

Remember earning good links (PageRank) and Information Architecture are still the most important elements to focus on when looking to get your large site indexed.

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I've had to do two today? Yes, two! Can we really have a "definitive" SEO test as the topic is ever evolving and so subjective.

Want to test your knowledge? There's a pretty neat one over at SEOMoz:

http://www.seomoz.org/seo-expert-quiz

I wont mention what I got :-)

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Because no-one has a Happy Monday unless you spent your weekend being Bez.

Want to gain some links very quickly? every SEO does silly....

• Setup Google Webmaster Tools on your domain upload an XML sitemap
• Wait to be re-crawled.
  
• Click on "not found" under "crawl errors" in your dashboard.

• Here you have a list of 404'ed URLs which are have links pointing to them.
  
• Download the list of URLs as a .csv
• Implement a 301 redirect from these URLs to your root domain.

Hey presto you've gained a few backlinks.

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