MindScape

Google toolbar page rank update which was expected to happen by the end of April, finally seems to be eventuated. We were observing real time inconsistency in our toolbar page rank (Sometimes it went to 5 and sometimes to 0).

Finally the chase has been in our favour and google has assiged a page rank of 4 to Vinove’s website www.vinove.com ( an accession of 2 points).

The April, 2007 page rank update has happened to be negative for many website owners as they have observed a dip in their page rank.

Real time changes have taken place with the new link algorithms coming into existence

1) Google disrespected all our links from pages like (links resources, links etc..etc)
2) Links below PR 2 were disregarded
3) Higher number or links coming in from ethical medium (Blogs, Articles etc. etc.) were considered.

For more information regarding the April 2007, Page Rank Update Click Here

As of today, most of the link building efforts are geared towards enhancing the Google Page Rank to further improve the search engine rankings. This may not be a wise approach considering the rapid changes in the world of search engines.

While acquiring links, it might be a good idea to consider the following:

* Traffic on the website that you wish to get a link from (both quality and quantity).
* How many links are already placed on the page?
* What is the relative position of your link?
* What is the quality of the neighboring links?
* Is the page a content oriented or a link laden page?

If due attention is paid to all/most of the above, not only the links acquired would result in PR enhancement but would also further help generate quality traffic to the website.

As a rule of thumb, if a link is acquired with a mindset of generating traffic rather than increasing the in-bound link number, it is bound to help your website on all facets!

Search engines seem to be either testing or moving towards a social search paradigm. Some of the examples include:
http://www.younanimous.com
http://www.eurekster.com/

Also, Yahoo is testing its social search engine:
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/faq

With numerous businesses relying on search engine rankings primarily, if not exclusively, an important question to ask is: What would be the future of Internet Marketing/SEO?

Some of the rather instant thoughts that come to mind are:

* Internet Marketing would further move towards a paid model with in-organic results over taking the organic ones.
* The search engine rankings would not only be driven by the search engine algorithms.
* The importance of currently existing concepts namely Google PageRank would recede.
* Content would rule: Websites serving quality content would attract repeat quality visitors and higher popularity resulting in even higher traffic.
* Meta search engines that integrate a number of tools like digg, del.icio.us etc. would further gain popularity.

It is now time for companies around the world re-think their long term Internet Marketing strategies and plan accordingly to minimize the “damage” social search engines might cause!

More later!

We noticed a change in the PR for some of our websites’ internal pages followed by a back link update. Seems like the Google PR update is underway!

Anybody else noticed any changes to the PR?

We are looking at hiring trainee web developers and marketeers for our company. We started advertising for the position Thursday last week and conducted a round of walk-ins last Sunday (10:00 am - 3:00 pm).

Thinking that the interviews will begin at 10:00 am, I planned to reach the office just in time. Noticing a missed call from our HR with a time stamp of 9:30 am, I returned the call and was told that we had over 50 candidates waiting already! Ouch!

Upon reaching work, I saw a crowd outside our office premises and realized that these were people waiting to be interviewed. By now the number grew to over 200 (within a span of 30 minutes). It took me 15 minutes to get to the first floor as the complete stair case was jam packed with interviewees!

We had candidates coming in from not only Delhi but various other towns/cities (Agra, Jaipur, Meerut to name a few!)

All of our interviews/tests were online and required 30 minutes. Looking at the overwhelming number in for the interview, we decided to shorten the interview to 15 minutes to accommodate as many candidates as possible!

The rest of it is history - we had interviews until 5:30 pm and could not believe when I checked and realized that we had approximately 600 people take the test on the very same day!

The team did an excellent job at managing interviews for such an unexpected large number of people! Although, it was exhausting but the results were overwhelming too!

Congratulations clan!