Sure, PageRank is older than Emperor Palpatine, but a lot of SEOs still use it as their primary metric for link research and rankability. Unfortunately, using PageRank exclusively to measure progress and page value can yield results as ugly as the Emperor's face. Since Google updates PageRank so sporadically, you may not get an accurate picture of a page's actual value. Read Full Story

Google is now making $3 billion a month in advertising — the majority of which comes from little text ads next to search results.You might wonder how that’s possible, and who’s spending that much money on search ads. The answer, according to Larry Kim — the founder of a company that sells software to analyze text ad campaigns — is in industries where a customer is worth a lot of money over the long-term. Full Story

Google is getting more social, and its web analytics tools are no exception; Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools have added new tools for tracking the impact of tweets, likes, +1s & more on your website’s traffic.

Google Webmaster Tools now has a “+1 Metrics” section, which provides reports on the impact of the +1 Button on search. The new analytics show how +1s affect your website’s clickthrough rate (CTR). It tracks the amount of +1s on a given page, the CTR with +1 annotations and the CTR without +1 annotations. The new tool also graphs out the amount of annotated impressions and annotated clicks your website receives over time. Read Full Story

It's here! Google has released Panda update 2.2. This time around, Google has - among other things - improved their ability to detect scraper sites and banish them from the SERPs. Of course, the Panda updates are changes to Google's algorithm and are not merely manual reviews of sites in the index, so there is room for error (causing devastation for many legitimate webmasters and SEOs). A lot of people ask what parts of their existing SEO practice they can modify and emphasize to recover from the blow, but alas, it's not that simple. Rand of SeoMoz.org discusses how the Panda updates work and, more importantly, how Panda has fundamentally changed the best practices for SEO.

Google describes its new +1 button as a way to say "this is pretty cool" or "you should check this out". Much like the "like" button on Facebook which displays your approval for a brand, artist, or product, the Google button will show your "stamp of approval" to your friends and contacts in search results. The feature is intended to "give the right recommendations, at the right time, and in the right format" and users can choose who gets to see their +1's in their public Google profile. Google hopes that other websites will also jump on board by adding a +1 button. The button is slowly rolling out and it will be a few weeks before every user notices the addition. More from Google