fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

It’s been a long standing assertion amongst the A-list members of the SEO community that PageRank does not equate with ranking: Too many low PR sites hitting top spots in the SERPs, outdoing their high PR competitors, it’s really hard to come to any different conclusion. However, now there’s a statistical study determining PR evolution in the Google SERPs over the past 6 months and analyzing the correlation between PR and rankings, offering some interesting conclusions

Search industry watchdogs have noticed an ongoing radical slashing of many (former) darlings’ PR values. It’s happening across the board and has hit a slew of previously high PR rated sites. Is this a consequence of Google’s clamping down on link sellers? Not everyone seems to think so.

Seems that in the cause of pimping their Checkout servicel, Google feels that just about any means will justify the end - including violating their own Webmaster Guidelines re paid links.

There’s some indication that Google’s handling of their Supplemental Index may be in for a dramatic change in terms of links being allowed to pass anchor text in future. If confirmed, it would constitute a fairly dramatic turnaround in their ranking policy.

Good, affordable link building networks aren’t exactly a dime a dozen these days. Here’s a new one (still in pre-launch) that seems both well conceived and very promising even though there’s still some scope for improvement.

In the prevailing atmosphere of link fetishism, .edu sites have evolved into a prime target for white and black hat SEOs alike. Here’s a mystery site offering you your own .edu site blog and text link. Alternately, get your own oneway .edu links for free instead.

This cool embedded browser can be customized and included on any web page - an ideal tool to promote your services and products, including RSS feeds. It’s even WAP compatible.

Aaron Wall writes on the basic uselessness of present day link analysis programs.

In what comes along almost as a mere aside, Michael Martinez presents a highly condensed, no frills take on optimizing for Google over at High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum.

Seems that with some time on his hands, Freelance web developer Joel Strellner has developed one of the niftiest and most useful web spy tools and SEO / SEM resources we’ve seen in a while: URLTrends.

It’s not every day that you can follow the birth of a new buzzword and how it gradually begins to make out on the search engines in realtime. This is actually any linguist’s and SEO’s dream and highly educative, too.

Michael Martinez has done it again: his revised and expanded version of his original take is easily the most important reverse-engineering based analysis of Google’s present and future ranking algorithm published the world has seen for the past 2 years or so.

Link Sabotage – the hiterhto unthinkable suddenly possible in Google? Follow these threads if you don’t want to wake up to some nasty surprises.

Google’s filing a new search patent: if you read the fine print you’ll find hard confirmation of what Google critics have surmised all along.

Michael Martinez speculates on Google TimeRank, Trusted Content Site, Child Inheritance, List Inheritance, etc.
One of the best and most plausible, experience-based analyses we have seen in a long while.