From: Webmaster Central Blog – by Luisella MazzaWebmaster Level: Intermediate. We hear lots of questions about site architecture issues and traffic drops, so it was a pleasure to talk about it in greater detail at SMX London and I’d like to highlight some key concepts from my presentation here. First off, let’s gain a better understanding of drops in traffic, and then we’ll take a look at site design and architecture issues. Understanding drops in traffic As you know, fluctuations in search results happen all the time; the web is constantly evolving and so is our...

by Sam Niccolls SEOmoz.com (NOTE FROM RAND: Please welcome Sam Niccolls, SEOmoz’s newest addition to the consulting team – we hope you all like him as much as we do!) A lot a marketers focus optimization efforts at the bottom of their conversion funnels. One effective way to examine conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel is to create a custom segment that excludes visitors who bounce. As this segment gives you a view of your engagement data that only shows interested visitors, this is a great way to inform site changes. After all, these visitors are the ones who are most likely...

By Matt Cutts People think about PageRank in lots of different ways. People have compared PageRank to a “random surfer” model in which PageRank is the probability that a random surfer clicking on links lands on a page. Other people think of the web as an link matrix in which the value at position (i,j) indicates the presence of links from page i to page j. In that case, PageRank corresponds to the principal eigenvector of that normalized link matrix. Disclaimer: Even when I joined the company in 2000, Google was doing more sophisticated link computation than you would observe from the classic...