Dear Reader,

Happy tidings – the Web CEO Team has added a newsletter to our offerings. We are not only going to share with you the SEO concepts and buzz Web marketing news, but we’ll also suggest very practical things and ideas that you can use. And believe us, education is not boring! Education can be fun!

Web CEO Editorial Team

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Google webmaster chat: indirect answers to direct questions

Summing up Googlers’ answers to webmasters’ questions, we took notice of a few things webmasters are very curious about, but they can only guess at – even the expert opinions differ a great deal. Read the answers and conclusions from the third online Webmaster Chat.

• Googler: “… if a site is made in a way that users run away right away, then chances are that we might not be recommending it as much as other sites that users like.” – We can conclude that the information Google receives through its toolbar is used in the ranking algorithm.
• Googler: “I think it is fair for Google to use that [age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered] as a signal in some circumstances.” – The age of domains and sites are ranking factors.
• Googler: “Google uses a bunch of signals like location of the server or the TLD in order to determine which users might be interested in the sites content. “– This means the location of the server does influence the local page rankings.
• Googler: “If you’re moving from one URL to another (even if it’s on a different domain), ranking signals can be passed via a 301 [redirect].” – Google will pass your old domain ranking information to the new domain if you make a proper redirect – 301. However, you should not use a 302 redirect.
• Googler: “We work hard to make sure a site can’t have a negative effect on another site.” – So, a bunch of links from “bad neighborhoods cannot cause a drop in site rankings.”
• Googler: “We generally treat all links the same – be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.”
• Googler: “PageRank is re-computed all the time (different PageRanks every day). But we update the toolbar PageRank 3-4 times/year.” – The toolbar PageRank is often misleading and does not show a true picture.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Global Search Engines (%)

This chart gives the idea of the market share of each of the three major search engines. As we can see, Google’s share has slightly grown over the year, while all other search engines are not gaining in popularity.

Visitor Referrers (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites. Despite the fact that social media is growing in popularity, search engines keep the crown and remain a top referrer. SEO does make a lot of sense even in our Web 2.0+ era!

SEO Predictions 2009

“The software the marketing department uses will become more important than the creative agency they use. Software will be as critical for marketing as it is for accounting.”
Pete Caputa, The HubSpot Inbound Internet Marketing blog

“SEM efforts can and should be reported. Documenting SEM efforts, showing both the successes and struggles is one of the core reasons that SEM has the ability to grow in 2009.”
Adrian Schaal, E-Power Marketing

“Paid search will get cheaper on Google”
Adam Audette, Audette Media

“Universal [search] is really useful and I think it will continue to expand and what that means in 2009 you can’t just think of yourself as an SEO.”
Matt Cutts, Google’s Webspam team

“Local search will be the big thing in 2009 for search.”
William Flaiz, Razorfish