Google Hilltop Algorithm

Why Page Theme is Usually More Important than PageRank:
In the Hilltop white paper they talk about how they can use expert documents to help compute relevancy. An expert document is a non affiliated page which links to many related resources. If page A is related to page B and page B is related to page C then a connection between A & C are assumed.

Additionally Hilltop states that it strongly considers page title and page headings in relevancy scores (in fact these elements can be considered more important than link text).

The benefit of Hilltop over raw PageRank (Google) is that it is topic sensitive - and is thus generally harder to manipulate than buying some random high power off topic link would be. The benefits of Hilltop over topic distillation (Teoma) are that Hilltop is quicker & cheaper to calculate, and that it tends to have more broad coverage.

When Hilltop does not have enough expert sites the feature can be turned off. It is believed that Google is using Hilltop to help sort the relevancy for some of their search results today.

Google Financial Stats, Mobile Search, RSS Advertising

Google Finance:
John Battelle has lots of yummy stats about Google's finances...

  • nearly 17% of visitors click on ads.

  • Google makes an average of 54 cents a click.
  • Google makes on average nearly a dime from the average US search

Though Danny Sullivan makes a guest appearance in the comments to say the figures may be off (if they did not take in account for contextual ads).

Rob Frankel:
My favorite branding guru has a great rant blog. His view of Paxil and Prozac for children...

Trellian Seasonal Keyword Research:
Out of touch with the season?

Malcolm Gladwell:
One of my favorite authors gives a speech (about a month old, but his stuff is always good)

Contextual Ads:
Chitika is a new contextual ad network (their parent company has also been powering eBay's keyword driven banners)...rumor has it they might be writing some quality PR stuff too.

Laptops & Porn:
always a bad idea...

Mobile Search:
How it will change everything...or will it? I think there is a ton more to the world than just registering a name. Sure people will easily be able to link up regular publications and products to web locations, but the reason Amazon is successful is not just its product offering or customer service, but the rich feedback past consumers have left in their system. I think our social interactions and the trails we leave on the web are worth a ton more than this article seems to believe.

Mobile People Search:
US to use electronic passports.

Eventual RSS Doom:
Will its popularity destroy it?
Should People Run RSS Ads?

I think the links and attention you get from RSS subscribers will have more longterm value than their cost. If hosting costs are killing you go with Blogger or find a host who wants some cheap marketing (a hosted by link on your site).

Its not uncommon for businesses to have loss liters. If many of your readers / RSS subscribers also provide you tons of links then maybe you should look at the bandwidth as an advertising expense.

Those Random Late Night Purchases:
Internet Accelerator may help you download pages rack up credit card bills quicker.

Pages

« first‹ previous5678910