Anyway, moving forward, I have created a new list of websites that every SEO should know or at the very least is aware of.

1. http://www.seomoz.org – seomoz have not held back over the last year and 9 months, most notably the addition of Linkscape and Rand’s constant travelling have done nothing but push this company to the top of the industry.

2. http://www.linkdiagnosis.com – this website has also come a long way since I first started using it back in early 08, this link analysis tool is actually quite accurate although the results are only taken from Yahoo, link building can be very effective using this site

3. http://www.twitter.com – Twitter was a must in my previous list and it’s a must now. Any budding SEOs can learn a lot from following some of the leaders in the industry and seasoned SEOs can get a lot of good stories aggregated straight to your twitter home with absolutely no effort.

4. http://www.wolf-howl.com – A search blog with a different stance from many other industry leaders, not always agreeing with Google tactics and methods Michael Gray provides a good contrast in perspective and a sometimes light hearted Friday afternoon read.

5. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com – The official Google webmasters blog, there’s always a lot of activity happening over at the big G, it pays to keep on top of developments.

6. http://www.huomah.com/dojo – I can’t stress enough how good this website is, recently voted as number 1 for the “best paid subscription SEM community” by readers at Top Rank Blog. I’ve spoken to Dave (the ninja boss) many times and the amount of SEO he knows is scary!

7. http://www.sphinn.com – Sphinn is the equivalent to Digg for anything search related, the community has continued to grow over the last few years and although some recent technical decisions have caused some negative chatter – it still feels ace.

8. http://www.seobook.com – Aaron Wall has been in this business a long time and SEO Book provides great resources for SEOs around the world, I especially like the tool “Rank Checker” for snapshot views into ranking performance.

9. http://raven-seo-tools.com – The Raven site provides excellent SEO tools in the form of benchmarking, I used the site in it’s early days and it’s continued to get better and better – solid SEO blog too.

10. http://www.seo-browser.com – It’s important to know how search engines view your website, using SEO Browser can easy display what’s working and what’s not, very useful for performing site audits.

11. http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp – A lot of good SEO questions have been answered by Matt Cutts and co through the video format on YouTube, great watching, even if you just want to find out what T-shirt colour Matt wears.

12. http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories – Link building from authority based directories does still hold SEO value – fact. Aviva Directory created this list a while a go but many listings are still valuable, decent bookmark to have.

13. http://www.google.com/insights/search – Alas another Google link but extremely important for identifying keyword opportunities on generic and local based levels, although take a pinch of salt with the data provided.

14. http://searchengineland.com – one of the most important search blogs online with great insights and in depth discoveries, it would be rude not to include these boys.

15. http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog – This website has grown in authority and reputation over the last few years with much deserves. Constantly providing good SEO blog posts, free e-books and valuable insights, you’d be crazy not to be subscribed to this blog.

16. http://www.seounique.com/blog – I felt the need to add my blog on the list because I do run tests which may provide insights, I’m by no means like the others on this list but I’d appreciate the signup to my feed!

17. http://www.seroundtable.com – Great site for breaking SEO news stories or developments within the industry, plus they have great resources and a forum

18. http://www.bruceclay.com/blog – Solid SEO advice and one to keep on top of.

19. http://www.reelseo.com – Video SEO is something that’s been “around” for a while but never implemented to the full potential. Learn how to maximise this at this great site.

20. http://www.mybloglog.com – Essential for bloggers and online community builders.

21. http://technorati.com – I don’t think I need to explain why you should be aware of this site, news is information, knowledge is power.

22. http://econsultancy.com – An absolute must for any internet marketer. Community content, breaking stories, industry insights and a gazillion more things related to SEO.

23. http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/ – I’ve been in contact with Jeffery for a long time and his blog has never stopped producing quality SEO insights, theories and discoveries over the last 20 months, I suggest those of you who aren’t signed up do so!

24. http://www.google.com/analytics – This is quite an obvious one really, analytics packages are the backbone to any good online marketing campaign as they show the results and RIO for campaigns. The positives include extended insights and functions, landscape benchmarking, in depth data breakdown and its free!

25. http://socialmention.com/ – Brands are becoming more important in natural search and from social aspects, this website helps you monitor brand mentions online through various channels, best thing about this site – it’s free, unlike competitors.

However around the beginning of June 2009 the results in one particular high value industry (travel insurance) changed overnight to match the results seen in the USA back in February. Sites that had been in the top 10 for years all of a sudden have been forced into the depths of pages 2 and 3 being replaced with well known high street brands. I have collected some data which some of you may find interesting if you work in this industry, even if you don’t it’s worth taking note because this sort of activity seems to be spreading.

This first table shows a snap shot of the top 40 websites that rank under the term “travel insurance”, the results are compared from the start of June to the 6^th of July. A green arrow indicates a positive increase, red showing a negative drop and a green plus symbol indicating a new entry.

• Some sites worth mentioning:

• Post Office moving from position 12 to number 1

• Tesco’s moving from position 20 to number 7

• Essential Travel, Go Travel Insurance and more massively dropping

The next diagram actually shows the rankings over the last 5 months for the term “travel insurance”. In this diagram you can clearly see that this update has hugely effected the landscape in this industry.

I have heard this is happening for other financial terms too such as “car insurance” and Job related terms

I ran my competitor reports this morning and have noticed page rank updates happening across the board.

I have noticed many increases and some decreases in some large brands. This will make it the second page rank of 2009 and the third page rank in nearly 6 months.

If you want to check your own page rank visit Dig Page Rank

Let me know what you guys find out

I for one noticed this heavily in one of the industries I manage (travel related), every day one of 3 or 4 large brands would be shifted onto the homepage from the second or third page. This changed on a daily basis, giving these larger brands any position between 6 – 9.

Over the last week however it seems that this update has stopped dead. These brands are no longer being boosted to great positions for very highly searched phrases. I debated whether or not to mention this, part of me wants Google to have forgotten to switch the boost button on and the other part of me knows that updates in Google are as regular as minutes in the day.

Just my observations and would love to hear if any other SEO’s have seen the same?

I work on SEO for a number of clients in the travel insurance industry and I started to notice strange listings appearing in the top 10 results. At first I assumed it was Google testing something out, I researched the competitors to see if they had received a sudden impact of link juice, which they hadn’t. What startled me was that some of these websites had very few links in comparison to the usual “top dogs” of the industry. Added to that the actual content on these pages was not great usually and the listings looked completely out of place an irrelevant.

What I did notice was that the sites were .gov or a brand I recognised through other marketing channels, i.e. TV, direct marketing etc. As it’s probably been a week since this update has occurred (I don’t care what Matt Cutts says, this IS AN UPDATE). The random brand websites making an appearance seems to change daily and only one or two websites actually change on the first page, however pages two and three are moving all over the place.

To give you an example of what I mean about this update, look at the screenshot below, displaying the top 10 UK results for Travel Insurance, I have highlighted the term travel insurance to show which listing doesn’t belong in the results.

Now I’m sure this will calm down a bit over the coming weeks but this makes ranking for the smaller brands and sites that much harder and the bigger boys seem to have it easy – More to follow.

Areas to keep an eye on that I will investigate:

• Brand anchor texts
• Brand mentions
• URL anchor texts
• Domain age
• Brand Universal Search

So far in 2008 there have been 5 exports to the Google toolbar, far more than any previous years. Dates of the previous updates are below:

• 11/01/08
• 29/02/08
• 29/04/08
• 25/07/08
• 28/09/08

During these dates all pages within a domain would have each individual page updated with toolbar visible page rank. However I have seen pages, including my own which have been updated within the last week. This is also not an isolated incident – SEOMOZ also has pages updated.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/differential-diagnosis-a-broken-website-ranking-atop-google – this post was created on the 8th of November but is showing a PR 0, not a usual N/A.

See another example below:

However not all pages on every website seem to be experiencing this. I have many blogs and some posts which I consider to be more valuable still have no PR, even though they are older and have more backlinks.

So, what is this update? Throughout my own network of sites I have seen a slight trend and would really appreciate some other SEO’s and webmasters feedback and results on this.

1.    I have noticed Page Rank updates on blog posts that have no external links in the content
2.    I have noticed Page Rank updates on newer posts but less backlinks
3.    I have noticed Page Rank updates on “trusted sites” on posts only a week old with external links
4.    I have noticed Page rank updates on new blog posts for the past 3 weeks consecutively

Obviously we are all aware that Page Rank is something that Google wants to distance themselves from i.e. removing the mention in the toolbar download. However perhaps this is a new visible algorithm change for Google?

I would love to hear your thought’s people!

Your link will appear on the Google’s Website Optimizer Partners page which is 100% followed asnd juicy! What’s the catch I hear you say? Well there is a criteria to follow which includes (the following taken from Google’s Website):

• Have designed and implemented at least 3 verifiable and successful Website Optimizer experiments with 3 different referenceable clients. Please include client contact info, description of experiments, and screen shots of reports.
• Incorporated and in business for at least 2 years.
• Proven background in marketing. Please list any speaking engagements at conferences, influential blogs, white papers, management bios, ad campaigns, marketing programs, and/or other evidence demonstrating your expertise with testing and your ability to evangelize testing.
• Currently providing a range of service options including setup, training, and consultation for Google Website Optimizer. Please list your current Website Optimizer services and the approximate prices charged.
• Website content linked from your home page that prominently and exclusively describes your Google Website Optimizer services (please provide a link).
• Willing to attend and pass Google Website Optimizer technical training sessions (in English) at a Google office. Sessions usually last a few days and are held once per year in Mountain View, CA, USA.
• Able to commit to providing detailed product and market feedback on a quarterly basis. Please provide a sample of this feedback by identifying top 3 client objections to Website Optimizer, top bugs you’d like fixed, and top 3 new features you’d like to see.
• Have US$1M Professional Indemnity/Liability insurance.
• Able to commit to launching a minimum of 3 Website Optimizer experiments per quarter.

A bit of a hasstle for a link but if you work for a larger agency, this is entirely possible and achievable.

There are however a select few that continue to provide quality content on a weekly basis that I believe should be on every SEO’s RSS subscription.

1. SEOMOZ

SEOMOZ are an SEO company based in Seattle in the US and have become an anchor in the SEO industry. The leader of the pack so to speak would be Rand Fishkin who has continued to create great post content. The site offers a selection of free SEO tools to assist with analysis and they offer a members area which contains even more. Altogether I cannot find a better SEO blog out there, it’s that simple. I suggest you visit them immediately and start learning or touching up on your SEO skills.

SEOMOZ blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/seomoz

2. Search Engine People

Search Engine People are a Canadian based SEO company that have another fabulous blog that every SEO should be subscribed to. At the forefront of the great insights is Jeff Quipp. It’s strategy in this blog that I find most important, proven methods in dealing with the different scenarios of internet marketing, it’s bloody good dust I tell you.

Search Engine People blog feed: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/feed/

3. Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land is great for a number of reasons but what I like is when technical information or data comes up in posts that it’s always written in a way that is understandable to almost anyone, really great writing styles. The most recognizable character on the team would have to be Danny Sullivan the man who brought us our beloved Sphinn. They always deliver great quality and is a must for every SEO!

Search Engine Land’s blog feed: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland

4. Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal has a selection of very good blog authors, I tend to get the most value from Ann Smarty, and her posts are so detailed there’s never a short read! They provide insights and links to great tools and content that as an SEO you just can’t ignore.

Search Engine Journals blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SearchEngineJournal

5. Seo Scientist

A lot of other SEO’s would probably argue that there are more deserving SEO blogs to get this number 5 spot. Branko Rihtman is the author of this absolutely fantastic blog. As the name might suggest these blog posts are based around the inner workings of search engine behaviors, with extremely detailed posts and data to back up findings. The frequency of the posts is far less than others but when content is posted you can guarantee you will learn at least 1 new piece of information.

SEA Scientist’s blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoScientist

• Honourable mentions and still recommend signing up to their feeds:

• http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/sew
  http://www.seobook.com/rss.xml
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/SearchEngineRoundtable1
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/searchengineguide
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/Wolf-howl
  http://www.seobythesea.com/?feed=rss2
• And SeoUnique’s = http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoUniqueBlog

As you can see there was a link appearing to the search engines, now sometimes I get a bit of flack for having a short term memory but I would remember adding a link at the top of my own blog right? So to investigate further I looked at the site, no visible text.

So I obviously checked the source code too, nothing visible either.

So looking at the source through Plesk I located the header file for the blog where I had originally included the tracking code and to my surprise a little piece of code had appeared!

This was swiftly deleted with stern presses of my keyboard. I looked at other websites I had once used this tracking for and sure enough a succession of hidden links popped up, most IT related or Russian links.

I do warn people not to use these guys at all costs. I consider myself lucky that I wasn’t penalized by the search engines for this even though it was not my fault. I think I was more annoyed that I had been leaking link juice to these random websites for a period of time!

The other side of the coin suggests this method is obviously working for them and it was not detected by Google at all – guess the guys at the “Big G” should download a copy and try it out lol!

The dates have been collected every time Google updates their page rank – data centers tend to go down a week before an update and a backlink update also occurs before a PR update.

I am adding all PageRank updates on this page for future reference, dates currently range from 2007 to 2010 (Last updated April 2010)