There is a discussion going on in WebMasterWorld.com that some sites are seeing a drop in their page rank (PR).

I am seeing this too across many websites. Nobody knows whats going on inside Google, but something is surely happening.

Luckily my websites have not lost their page ranks

Let me remind you what Matt Cutts of Google once wrote in his blog that in reality Google maintains two page ranks. One that we see in the toolbar and the other a real floating-point number that Google keeps for internal search ranking.

Heres what he said:

It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.

If you are seeing Google page rank drop in any of your websites, don’t panic. There can be a lot of reasons.

One  – Some engineers in Google are doing (read testing) something, so the “virtual” page rank that you see has lost its green bar. What I mean is it can be temporary.

Two – If the site has not lost its rankings why panic in the first place? Afterall your visitors don’t see page rank and buy stuff from you.

Three – The page rank drop can be a software glitch in Google.

Four – Check your internet connection. Sometimes the internet speed is so slow that page rank doesn’t seem to download for ages. Refresh the page; you might see the page rank. If in doubt you can even visit an internet café / friend’s house / or check in any other computer to confirm the page rank drop.

Five – (very rare) Your Google Toolbar got corrupted. Download the latest version here and install.

Bottom line – DON’T do anything silly to increase page rank if you see a sudden drop. Since page rank is Google’s property and you don’t have any control over it, its better to create and keep building a good site, your page rank will improve with time.

Blackhat SEO are techniques used that are NOT liked by the search engines to get better ranks in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

Using black hat techniques may or may not produce results. Unfortunately even if it does it won’t be for the long run. If you want to establish a long term online business, please stay far away from Blackhat SEO techniques.

Ok. I won’t beat around the bush. Here are some simple black hat seo techniques:

1. Keyword stuffing / spamming: A method of unnecessarily repeating the keywords you are targeting in the content of the page to get top ranks.

Reason – you are “increasing” the keyword count in your copy just to get good ranks, and not because the copy requires it.

Result – May not get your site banned, but unfortunately you may not get good ranks. This technique worked till end 2005.

2. Hidden text: Using same color of the background and the text. If the color of your page is white and you are using white (or close to white) color for your text too, it’s considered a black hat seo technique.

Reason – the text will be invisible to the visitors, but will be visible to search engines, so the webmaster could increase the keyword count for the search engines and still write a different content for the visitors.
 
Result – Will get your site banned. Don’t do this.

3. Three way linking: Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A.

Reason – No link exchange, but one way link. As you can see there is no “link exchange” that has taken place but still something wrong has happened. Kind of a partnership?

Result – Interestingly if you aren’t caught, consider yourself lucky, because this is a kind of link spam. One or two occasions – its ok. But if the search engines find you are doing this too often, again your site may lose its rankings, because the link popularity will go down. Those 3 way inbound links will not be counted. Will not get a site banned, though.

4. Content copying: It’s easy for search engines to know if content is being copied from somewhere. The first publisher is considered the original copyright owner of the content. Anyone else publishing the same content later is considered a duplicate content. For a query the original content will be displayed first. However in some cases the original owner does not get the credit he / she deservers and copied content gets a better rank than the original.

But this happens in few cases only. It may happen because the author who copied the content must have added / edited some parts to make it more informative or interesting.

Reason – to “create” more content.

Result – May not get your site banned, but the site may get a low score overall because of copied content. The search engines may suspect that the site in future too may use copied content. Definitely the rankings will suffer.

5. Leaving popular keywords with spaces / new line in between without any information in the copy: This technique is very popular. Webmasters leave the keywords in the end of copy to get top ranks for those keywords.

For example:

black hat seo
blackhat seo
black hat seo
blackhat seo
black hat seo forum
black hat seo techniques
blackhat seo experts
blackhat seo expert
blackhat seo forum
black hat seo blog
black hat seo software
black hat seo tricks
black hat seo ebook
com blackhat seo
black hat seo forums
blackhat seo blog
blackhat seo tools
black hat seo tools
blackhat seo forums
blackhat seo techniques
black hat seo tactics
blackhat seo software
black hat seo methods
what is blackhat seo

(I hope it does not have any negative impact on my site, but since the intention is good I don’t think it will.)

Reason – To insert the related keywords in the copy to get better ranks for those keywords.

Result – Frankly I don’t know, but it’s better to avoid this. Why not write fresh content for each of the keyword? May not get the site banned but do you think a page of information on a particular topic will get a better rank or a page with just that keyword?

I must have missed a few black hat seo techniques. Do you know any?

Yahoo receives almost 20% of search made online. Google tops the list with almost 70%. Others like MSN (Live) and other small search engines share the rest 10%.

Yahoo has recently released the top 10 searched keywords in the Year 2008 for every category.

Here is the list:

By the Numbers – Top 10 Overall Searches

1. Britney Spears

2. WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)

3. Barack Obama

4. Miley Cyrus

5. RuneScape

6. Jessica Alba

7. Naruto

8. Lindsay Lohan

9. Angelina Jolie

10. American Idol

Market Meltdowns – Top 10 Economic Searches

1. IRS Stimulus Checks

2. Oil Prices

3. Gold Prices

4. Gas Prices

5. Dow Jones

6. Sallie Mae

7. Stock Market

8. AIG

9. Foreclosures

10. Debt Consolidation

Politics As Unusual – Top 10 Politician Searches

1. Barack Obama

2. Sarah Palin

3. John McCain

4. Hillary Clinton

5. George Bush

6. Ron Paul

7. John Edwards

8. Mike Huckabee

9. Arnold Schwarzenegger

10. Mitt Romney

News Stories – Top 10 News Stories

1. Hurricanes

2. Caylee and Casey Anthony

3. Election 2008

4. Pakistan

5. Pregnant Man

6. China

7. Iraq

8. Shelley Malil

9. Patrick Swayze

10. Afghanistan

Counting Olympic Gold – Top 10 Olympian Searches

1. Michael Phelps

2. Leryn Franco

3. Serena Williams

4. Kobe Bryant

5. Shawn Johnson

6. Jennie Finch

7. Misty May Treanor

8. Ronaldinho

9. Alicia Sacramone

10. Nastia Liukin

New Brat Pack – Top 10 Rising Celebrity Searches

1. Miley Cyrus

2. Vanessa Anne Hudgens

3. Chris Brown

4. Jonas Brothers

5. Rihanna

6. Taylor Swift

7. Jamie Lynn Spears

8. Hayden Panettiere

9. Zac Efron

10. Selena Gomez

Breaking The Glass Ceiling – Top 10 Searched Influential Women

1. Angelina Jolie

2. Sarah Palin

3. Oprah

4. Hillary Clinton

5. Gina Carano

6. Tina Fey

7. Michelle Obama

8. Katie Couric

9. Barbara Walters

10. Dara Torres

Final Farewells – Top 10 Send-Offs

1. Heath Ledger

2. Bernie Mac

3. Paul Newman

4. Randy Pausch

5. George Carlin

6. Estelle Getty

7. Tim Russert

8. Brad Renfro

9. Isaac Hayes

10. Boyd Coddington

Source: http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=351087

More Info: http://buzz.yahoo.com/yearinreview2008/