Web Toastie

Google takes a lot of factors into consideration when ranking a website in search listings, and hosting location is often said to be one of them. The physical location of a website isn’t necessarily important to improve rankings in your targeted country though, contrary to popular belief.

According to John Mueller, if your ccTLD is relevant to your targeted country, then Google will not take the location of the webserver into consideration. This means that you could have your website hosted in the US but it would not make a difference to your UK rankings providing that you have a .co.uk ccTLD.

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Both Google and Bing introduced a controversial change in their results yesterday, with the phrase ‘search engine optimisation’ being defaulted to ‘search engine optimization’. This may not seem like a big deal, but by forcing UK users to convert to American spelling it is giving less precedence to UK websites.

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After checking a couple of websites this morning, it seems there is a Google Toolbar PageRank update taking place. There hasn’t been much said about it so far, but a few blogs and forums are confirming that there has indeed been an update.

So far I have only seen PR changes on a couple of websites (including this blog, which is nice), but I guess it makes sense to update now on the last day of the year.

Is anybody seeing any strange PR updates at all? I’ve done limited testing so far.

I came across an interesting thread on the Google Webmaster Help Forums today regarding potential nofollow exploitations. The question asked was whether a rel=”follow” attribute added to a HTML link would void the nofollow that is in place. Adding rel=”follow” of course does nothing on it’s own, but having two rel= attributes seems to cause Google to interpret the link differently.

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Back in September I blogged about a Google URL trick that allowed you to view so-called real time search results. The issue with this was that it wasn’t exactly real time search results that were being displayed, as pages needed to be indexed first before they could be listed.

Today, however, that changes, as Google have announced they will now be providing users with real time results. The search feature, similar to Twitter, will allow users to view instant results from social networking websites, blogs, forums and news portals (although it is mostly Twitter at the moment).

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