Free Internet Marketing Seminar

Yeah, it sounds spammy, but I really am putting up a free one-hour seminar.  I thought it might be good to get feedback from local businesses, see how interested they are in the information involved in full internet marketing.  So I’m going to do an hour at the Renaissance (at 71st & 169) this Wednesday at 1 PM, talk about web site design, SEO, PPC, email marketing, and social networking.

Since it’s an hour I can only cover so many details, but I’m going to try giving out good information.  Hopefully people will be able to take something good from it.  I haven’t done a seminar on my own before (only as part of group presentations, previously), so this will definitely be a learning experience.  It should be fun, and we’ll see how things go.

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Web Design Revision Completed

So, FINALLY the new design is up.  I know, it tends to be the standard that web design companies do great design, but for some reason or another their own design is not exactly… pretty.  So I thought it was time to get Tulsa Marketing Online site’s design redone.

Yes, the blog is still in the original design, but hey, it’s a blog.  And the old site wasn’t horrific, but I didn’t like it too much.  I actually was the first designer, but I cannot claim fame for the new one.  That’s why there are people who are professional designers and do it better than silly coders/marketers.  I’m happy with the results, hopefully you like it, too.

In fact, go ahead – post a comment, tell me what you think!  I’m planning on making further (more minor revisions) to it, but I needed to get the redesign up sooner than later.  Now people visiting will know that this is more of the caliber of work that we do for web design, as opposed to the atrocity that was up before.

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PageRank Sculpting, NoFollow Tag Updates

So last month Matt Cutts posted a blog entry giving away some startling news.  Apparently the “nofollow” tag makes a link still absorb PageRank, but not pass it on.

In the past, most (educated) SEOs used the nofollow tag to adjust PageRank flow.  This was done because using the tag would completely block the link from passing PageRank, and that PageRank was passed on to the other valid links on the page.  This is called PageRank Sculpting.

The way this works is like this: say I have 4 links from a page I run.  The page has 60 “points” of PageRank.  Well, by default, all 4 links each get 15 points.  Before, if I wanted to make some of these links get more points (PageRank Sculpting), I’d add the nofollow tag to links.  So if I nofollow’d one of my 4 links, then the resulting 3 links would now pass on 20 PageRank points, adding more “link juice” to the pages they were pointing to.

From the updates on Google (which, apparently, have been running for over a year), this now is a bit different.  The link that I added the nofollow tag for still absorbs the 15 points, but does not pass this “link juice” on.  So I now have a page with 60 points of PageRank, 3 links get 15 points, and 15 points are lost.

As you might believe, this made many SEOs rather unhappy.  I myself am not thrilled with this news, this now makes me have to rethink/redefine PageRank Sculpting for my own SEO projects.  I know this is going to affect how many SEO’s use their blog comments, as well.  Before, defaulting the blog comments to nofollow meant that all links stayed intact, PageRank points stayed in the places the web developer wanted them to be.  Now, any additional comment (even if they are nofollow) pulls PageRank away from the site page.

Because of this, I suspect many SEOs will now either make their comments in an iframe, or remove comments from their blogs entirely.  I’m of the opinion Google actually gives PageRank to some sites based on links they have going out, not just links coming in.  This is very hard to test thoroughly, but I’m starting to wonder if leaving comments in a blog as dofollow would be better than not.

Eh, I’m just trying to keep integrity and do white-hat SEO, so I’ll try to find the best way to do it all.  We’ll see what comes of it.

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