Source: CNN.com (CNET) — Large Internet companies spend millions on consultants and technology trying to get their sites to rank among the highest results on Google. Everyone else has to rely on the poor man’s search-engine optimization: the link exchange. If you’ve ever hung up your own shingle on the Web, you’ve probably gotten an e-mail to this effect at some point: “Dear So-and-so, I believe your site and mine could benefit from exchanging links.” We probably get eight to 10 a week in the CNET News general mailbox, mostly from technology-related companies...

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 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...