Spell Check: Low PageRank Value May Be Caused by Spelling Errors

A relationship between low Google PageRank and bad spelling and grammar has been revealed in a video just made public. In the video, shown below, Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google makes a correlation between site content littered with poor spelling and grammar structure and low PageRank value. In a response to a question about whether or not spelling or grammar matters when Google evaluates websites, to which Cutts responded:
“We noticed a while ago that, if you look at the PageRank of a page — how reputable we think a particular page or site is — the ability to spell correlates relatively well with that. So, the reputable sites tend to spell better and the sites that are lower PageRank, or very low PageRank, tend not to spell as well.”
Cutts says grammar and spelling issues are not currently used as “direct signal” for search ranking; your page may have a perfectly edited content but still fail to rank prominently especially if the page fails on other aspects such as lack of focus on keywords, relatively fewer inbound links or poor navigation structure.

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Google Webmaster Reports in Google Analytics

When Google Webmaster Tools was introduced, its purpose was distinctive from other notable tools such as Google Analytics, provided by Google for free. It helps webmasters diagnose accessibility problems, view search engine activity statistics and set preferences such as preferred domain or crawl rates.

As Google Analytics and Google Webmasters started to introduce more tools, it has become evident that certain functions and reports are better utilized without switching over to another account. For example, while Google Analytics tells me which keyword referred traffic into my client’s website, it doesn’t tell me what is the click-through percentage is the site getting relative to number of times the website appears on search engine results. The latter can be answered by reports generated by Google Webmaster tools. Although this tool has been with Google Webmaster tools for quite some time, it was not introduced until 2007, at the time when Google Analytics and its keyword referral reports was roughly a year and half years old.

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How to Add User Access to Google Webmaster Tools Accounts

When working with clients, it is common to access various Google reports using different accounts.

For example, if the client has already set up Google Analytics tracking for his website prior to working with me, he may grant me access using my Google Account. Doing so offers me convenience in using my account to log in without offering complications. That’s because an account used to access Google Analytics may also be used to access other applications such as email, photos, blogs and documents which client obviously doesn’t want me to access.

With that in mind, Google Analytics made it easier for us to add someone else’s account or our accounts be added by administrators who manage our sites. In the same light, Google Webmaster tools also offer a similar way of adding access to the diagnostic tools it offers to websites.

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Google Redefines Internal, External Links

Google has mad a small yet significant change in how it defines internal and external links.

What we previously know before as external links are no longer classified that way. Links coming from subdomains used to be known as external are no longer grouped as such.

Based on its Google Webmaster blog post

Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we’re changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.

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‘Gmail’ Search Query Returns Unexpected Results in Photo Results

For some reason, typing ‘gmail’ as search query will yield unexpected results, Barry Schwartz discovered in his article at Search Engine Land.

Google’s Photo search, unlike the more prominent Image search, displays results culled from Picasa Web Album, a photo sharing website similar to Flickr. Picasa allows free 1 GB storage Google Account users. Google’s default image result is extracted from Google Images, a sophisticated search tool that allows users to fine-tune search results based on image dimensions, color, or type (clipart, photo, etc).

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