Aaron Wall broke the news on his site about Google’s new algorithm update.  Supposedly, this update places heavy emphasis on a site’s “brand.”  You can read more about Aaron’s take on this issue here.

There are a good number of people complaining about this algorithm update.  Apparently some sites have lost their ranks to more noteworthy brands.  This certainly could be the reason why so many webmasters think big name companies are getting preference in the serps over their more relevant websites.

To put some water on this fire, Matt Cutts has publicly acknowledged that a change was recently made to Google’s algorithm.  According to Matt, this is not a major update but one of the 300-400 minor updates they make yearly.  Matt also noted that the change would probably not even be noticed by the majority of webmasters.

For those that like to submit to quality premium web directories, this post is for you!

Over at Directory Blogger, they have recently posted some coupon codes to use at some of the Web’s top directories.  Some of these coupon codes expire soon, so take advantage of it while you can.

To get these coupon codes, simply go to Directory Blogger’s web directory coupon code page and get busy. 

If you know of any other directories that have coupon codes, please comment here.  Especially in today’s economy its always nice to save some money!

For all of those domainers that park domains, Google is finally allowing Adsense to be placed on parked domains.  That’s right, this is a full blow parking service provided by Google and is available to all USA Adsense accounts.

Apparently from December 11th, 2008 to December 18th, 2008 all Adsense accounts will have this feature enabled.  If its not in your account yet, be patient.

Unlike most parking providers, Adsense requires participants to create A name and CNAME records for each domain added to the Adsense for Domains parking program.  Providing your domain(s) are using your Registrars nameservers, this is not a big deal unless you plan to serve Adsense on a large number of parked domains.  Hopefully Google will decide to handle each domains DNS in the future which would certainly make the parking program easier for people to use.

If you notice in my previous posts, PageRank has been a big issue lately.  The 9/26/2008 PR update had some major problems, some of which included pages only days old getting assigned PR.  It appears Google has responded to this outcry and has rolled back the PR to its previous state on 9/25/2008.

At first there was a lot of commotion about the 9/26/2008 PR update.  Many deserving Websites lost PR and new pages, not even a week old, gained PR.  After some thought, I wonder if the PR update we saw was Google’s internal PR being exported.  The evidence seems to point in that direction.

As I noted in my last post, the latest Google PR update on 9/26/2008 was quite abnormal.  Deserving sites that should have got PR actually lost PR.  Undeserving and/or sites not promoted gained PR.  The day after this PR update, and on Google’s birthday, Webmasters are lashing out at Google.  Some are even calling Google’s PR algorithm as being broken and badly neglected.

Here’s some highlights of the talk going on…

In this Digital Point post, a Website owner claims that he received a PR 3 on a page that he posted just yesterday.  He claims it is not even indexed in Google Search yet.

Also in the same thread, this post from another Webmaster claims he received a PR 2 from a blog post he made just days prior.

Well, here comes yet another Google PR update.  It seems that with each update I am left scratching my head how and why Google calculates PR.

I’m not going to name any URLs, but just visualize this.  Two PR 3 directories, which were created about the same time, each having a much different backlink profile.  I will take a look at these in more detail in this post.

The first PR 3 directory has a total of 905 backlinks reported by Yahoo Site Explorer.  Looking at these backlinks, I can see that none have any PR.  In fact, most of the links are from other directories.

When it comes to link building, a great way to develop links is to comment on blogs.  Now I’m not talking about comment spam, but real genuine comments to the posted article.  Quite a few people do this, and many are finding that when they submit their comments they are going to a blank page.

Spam is a huge problem for bloggers.  Just last week I received over 3,000 spam comments.  Fortunately I run Akismet, a plugin for Wordpress that is intended to combat the onslaught of blog spam.  The downside to this is that good/genuine comments can be returned as a false positive.

There are a good number of people that submit to web directories and have no idea which directories are actually worth paying for an express submission review.  So today I am going to briefly cover this topic.

First, let’s be blunt.  Most people that spend money to be listed in a web directory are doing so because their link will appear on a page with pagerank.  This is evident by the number of people that complained after their $200+ link on Alive Directory was no longer on a page with pagerank.  The Alive Directory had been penalized, and some of the people with links in that directory claimed they got nothing for spending over $200.  But yet their sites were still listed.  The bottom line is this.  Paid directories charge a fee for a listing review, and not for pagerank.  Pagerank does fluctuate, and can be taken away at any time by unethical link building practices.  So let’s look at how you can visually identify the better directories and get a better return on your submission expenses.

One of the easiest ways to build one way links back to your site is with Web Directory submissions.  In this post I am just going to discuss free directory submissions.  Paid directories have their place too, but that’s something I’ll discuss later.

There are basically three methods to submit to free web directories.  Those methods are fully automatic, semi automatic, and manual.

Automatic directory submissions should be avoided at all costs.  Why?  Because spam bots and link spammers try to post at many of the sites that have no CAPTCHA.  There is no benefit to being listed on sites that are potentially “bad neighborhoods” filled with spammy links.

In my portfolio of domain names, I have a few good ones that I just can’t ever see myself parting with.  The reason?  They have a lot of type in traffic.  But I’ have a domain name that someone else has wanted for years, and this post chronicles some of my dealings with this domain name stalker.

Every few months I get an offer for one of my domains.  The initial price they suggest is always around $300-$400.  Then I get into discussions with the person and they ask how much I want to sell it for.  I tell them $x,xxx, which I feel is a good value.  They always respond saying the most they will pay is $800.