Google’s latest changes to it’s search engine results is causing headaches for many small businesses. Codenamed “Jagger”, the changes have caused many websites to drop down the search engine rankings, and their Google PageRank reduced.

In a nutshell, Google has improved its ability to detect and punish artificial link building schemes. In brief, Google has devalued:

• Creating many small interlinked websites designed to create numerous inbound links to manipulate a website’s PageRank. Google is now able to correlate all the sites a person or company knows
• Participating in link farms with many identical links
• “Off topic” recipricol links (in other words, just buying random, unrelated links)
• “Add your link free” free-for-all weblinks

One other issue: Google is showing a general increase in rankings of older sites (more than 2 years old.)

Keep up the good work: rich content, quality links, on-page optimisation, and you may have actually seen benefit from these latest changes. My site did!

MarketingExperiments have published a very interesting report on the impact of press releases on website traffic and inbound links, and found that effective PR can deliver an ROI superior to PPC advertising. You will need to register for this free report, but it is worth it.

Don’t forget to attend the Ebusiness Expo taking place on the 30th November at the East Midlands Conference Centre. It’s free and you can hear people from Google, Yahoo and other ebusiness experts talk about important ebusiness issues.

See you there.

Good Keywords is a free software download which helps you to identify keyphrases to use in your SEO strategy. It includes a keyphrase generator, keyword density analyser. It pulls in data from Google, MSN, Overture, Alexa, as well as other search engines.

An excellent utility for you to use when researching your keyphrases.

I’ve started using a utility that removes the advertisements from Google. It’s a Firefox plug in called CustomizeGoogle. It’s wonderful to see the Google results without all that pay per click muck.

CustomizeGoogle also provides quick links to run your search in the other major search engines, which is a great way to do your market research.

Microsoft are launching their new pay per click search engine advertising programme. It is currently being trialled by invitation only, but you can see details at MSN’s “AdCenter” pay per click advertising service.

Advertising on the MSN search engine is currently powered by Overture, but that is all set to change.

Search Engine Lowdown has previewed the new version and gives an assessment of the new AdCenter features.

Google has recently updated its information for webmasters.

Discussions include how Google ranks pages, how to make corrections to your listing, how to get listed.

Good basic information

Jakob Nielsen is back at it again, this time summarising the top ten usability mistakes made by bloggers. Blogs should be an important part of many companies’ marketing strategies – both for SEO as well as other marketing tactics.

Summary: Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.

I’ve been experimenting with eBay and have set up an eBay shop whose proceeds will benefit Skylarks holidays for the disabled, a charity based in West Bridgford.

Please bid generously – and help to support Skylarks!

My experience at these workshops are then contributing to the forthcoming series of eBay means Sales workshops offered by Connected Nottingham.

What factors influence your website’s position in the major search engines? Seomoz.org have asked 13 SEO experts and published a report listing the factors that are important in the search engine results.

To save you time, the top 10 factors are:

1. Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Links
3. Keyword Use in Document Text
4. Accessibility of Document
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site
7. External Links to Linking Pages
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
9. Global Link Popularity of Site
10. Keyword Spamming