All good SEOs know that the Google toolbar PR means nothing — it is, after all, a frozen value of PageRank that could be four months out of date. But one could be excused for getting nervous if their site is greybarred for a looooong time. Not good for the street cred. Certainly not good for attracting links. Makes you look like a banned site unless you check for indexed files.

NetMagellan had no toolbar PR for 8-9 months since it was launched and I had not come across such a long delay before. In my experience, a new site gets a measly PR-zero (really means PR <1 rather than null) within a couple of months and a handful of ordinary links. There was no ranking concern here, as more than 60% of the traffic is from organic search results. I wasn’t losing any sleep, but more than one SEO had commented on the grey bar, so it was a minor irritation at best.

A new ranking update is in progress and the home page now shows PR4. Of course that means “nothing”, but at least I won’t have to make much ado about nothing. 😆

Edward Lewis, who posts as pageoneresults, a moderator on Webmasterworld, is a man after my heart. We have similar high ideals about quality in the SEO profession. Entry into his SEO Consultants directory is very difficult and anyone who does not meet his high standards is removed immediately, if not sooner. I have a high regard for his SEO knowledge and follow his writings on WW. (At present, he is very close to the California bush fires so let’s wish they are put out very soon.)

Anyway, this is not about Edward, but about his sense of humour. Check out his Clueless SEO page, which is aimed at link requestors who send link requests to inappropriate websites. All the simians on that page have Indian names, so it seems that he has received one link request too many from someone with an Indian name. See also the SEO Link Exchange link which lists many SEO companies from various countries who made the mistake of spamming him.

I can’t say I blame him. I have an Australia and New Zealand directory where my registration acknowledgment email reminds the new member that I only want websites that are in or about Australia or New Zealand. Then I place a new paragraph below telling Indian SEOs to read the previous paragraph.  It seems to be working, as I see a lot of applications that are not followed by link submissions. Before I did that, I had a daily chore of deleting non-AU/NZ submissions submitted by people with Indian names or whose IP addresses resolved to India.

Regardless of your nationality, if you have linkers on your staff, please beat them with a clue stick if they send link requests to inappropriate sites. Perhaps they don’t care if their submission is deleted, but this isn’t a long-term customer retention tactic. It doesn’t take much more time to check the suitability of a potential link partner, so why not get it right the first time?

About a year ago iPrash blogged about Yahoo! India’s Pune pages, which feature the set of eight Ganpati temples known as Ashtavinayak (eight Vinayak — Vinayak being another name for Ganpati). As a child I visited seven of the eight temples, hence my interest in the subject. He wrote:

Then there is Ashtavinayak Darshan, which has all the facts & figures. The content was Not directly Copy-Pasted from any other existing websites… However, the content writer has done a good job of altering the original content, sentence by sentence. No harm in that, because, Yahoo India is doing a good job of having all this information online.

I don’t know what he saw then or why he made that observation, but a page I see today is worth plugging into Copyscape. A whole bunch of sites seem to have copied bits of the Yahoo content.

Not that it is worth copying.

The quality of English in India has gone downhill since I left it 34 years ago. Mine was also less than perfect, but I had the good fortune to land a job as Senior Editor at Unisys that filled in the gaps. Unisys had a great Product Information department that produced shelves full of style guides and other editorial aids.

Thanks to the returned H1B visa holders, the outsourcing industry, the call centres and the influence of the Internet, many young Indians don’t know whether they are using American English or the mutated British English that is passed off as Indian English. Have you noticed that Indian mums have become moms?

Anyway, back to Yahoo! India. Witness this paragraph from this page (bolding mine):

Ultimately he undertook a sever penance at the site of the temple and attained the blessings of Lord Ganesha, owing to which he attained success in his endeavor. As a token of appreciation Lord Vishnu built a temple in Ganesha honor at the sight where he had offered his obeisance. Over the yugas the temple went to ruins and was reconstructed when a shepard found the lords idol lying among the debris. The temple received the patronage of

(We won’t find out whose patronage it was, as the sentence ends there, leaving us in suspense. The rest of the Ashtavinayak pages are replete with similar errors.)

Frankly, those pages do an injustice to Yahoo!, the English language and the deity they seek to honour. I don’t mind the Indian Yahoos pleasing their American masters with the use of American English, but get it right, one way or the other. Yahoo! has some fine editors in the US office — use their guidance.

This coming December there are two overlapping SEO conferences of note:

• Webmasterworld, Las Vegas, Dec 4-7
• Search Engine Strategies, Chicago, Dec 3-6

Which one is better?

That depends on who you are. I have never been to any SES but from what I hear they (the US-based events) are great for SEOs to connect with potential customers, not to learn anything of value from an SEO knowledge perspective. SES targets:

• Online marketers
• Executives
• Business owners
• SEM/SEO professionals
• Media planners/buyers
• Webmasters
• Direct marketers
• Agency professionals
• E-commerce managers

Webmasterworld targets a smaller set of the above and draws its audience from its forum, which is mainly populated by affilliate marketers and SEOs. The main feature of the latter is that the participants are doers — the hands-on experimenters, experts, algorithm-speculators, and note-comparers. In short, you get useful knowledge there, provided you know enough to recognise the experts from the speculators.

I know many people who attend both SES and Webmasterworld, but SES happens many times a year across North America, so they have other opportunities. If they ran one after the other, I could have attended both. 😀 Which one do you prefer?

I received two copies of the following email at two email addresses:

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If you are an SEO, you might have received one of these emails too. Isn’t it exciting! (Sorry, I am in a mischievous mood)  😈