It seems unlike Google to issue two page rank updates within 3 months but there has been chatter that the next update is in progress. If you check your Page Rank using Dig Page Rank then you can see the data centers are being updated.

Before you get carried up in the hustle and bustle of all the forum posts and blog posts – remember a few key points about Page Rank:

1. Page rank does not determine traffic

2. Page Rank does not determine SERPS

3. Page Rank updates all the time, it just takes time for the green bar to update on toolbars

4. Linking for PR is against Google’s rules and not the right mentality

For those of you that are not aware www.seonoobs.com started an seo contest on the 4th of February where a search result that returns 0 results was given to entrants. This term was “Yicrosoft Directory” – presumably because of the buzz around Microsoft bidding for Yahoo.

The keyword phrase was given at around 2am GMT (which I had no intention to stay up for). I will just break down what my initial process was; which might provide insight for some and be a gentle read for experienced seoers.

I initially looked for a domain with the keywords “Yicrosoft Directory” included, as predicted all .com’s .net’s etc had been taken. I finally settled with the domain www.yicrosoft-directory-online.com which is easy to remember and contains the important keywords.

Unfortunately the day I did this, my server was compromised and all my sites went down for 72 hours. Undeterred by this I decided to register a “free” domain from Wordpress. I created a nice looking blog, posted around 8 posts based on the keyword, generated some links etc – the gods seemed against me however and Wordpress deleted all “Yicrosoft Directory” additions, including mine. Disheartened by this I decided to drop out of the contest, bowing down gracefully.

More than anything it was a nice opportunity to look at how Google reacts to different seo techniques from the start, instead of working on a site that already ranks or returns around 12 million indexed results.

Then last week I decided to look at Google’s rankings of my previous competitors – to my surprise my original .com was ranked around number 15, not bad considering I had done absolutely nothing. The domain name itself appeared to carry a lot of weight!

Anyway, I have been link building and I made one post, installed a Wordpress blog, chose a design, optimised it best I could and sat back. There is around one week left and I am now ranked 3rd overall, out of about 24 contestants, if I win I will be surprised as other contestants have had a good 14 day head start over me. I will also post an in depth process of how I tackled this contest when the competition ends, good luck the other contestants, home stretch now!

Visit my Yicrosoft Directory entry

This is something that has been on my mind for quite some time now and I wasn’t sure 100% if it was true or not, until now.

For those of you that know me I love StumbleUpon, it provides great on going traffic if you setup and maintain your profile correctly – see my post “Unofficial StumbleUpon guide”. Occasionally my blog posts would get stumbled by someone else for whatever reason but I considered SU a means of letting people know when I have a new post out, in case people have not subscribed via RSS.

Last month, one morning I typically wrote a post and used my usual means of promotion, or so I thought. Later that day I checked to see if any reviews had been made on the submission and to my surprise there was no listing visible. I thought perhaps there had been a mistake when I submitted, so I tried a different technique and looked on my profile again, still no submission – so what am I dong wrong? – Nothing at all is the answer here.

When I now try and submit my own blog content the process appears to work, when you later check it returns this result:

So why has this happened?

I suppose it’s to stop people gaming the system, which I don’t really consider it doing as the content is different each time. I have had friends get URL’s band in Digg before simply because they submitted the same domain too many times so I’m quite glad that the domains don’t get banned entirely.

If anyone else has started to have this problem too please use the poll below, it will be interesting to see the results: