This is beginning to resemble a kindergarten battle now, whatever one search engine does the other goes and copies it and surprisingly this time it has nothing to do with the search market or the annulment of a search engine optimisation technique.

In a attempt to enable consumers to better understand their household energy consumption, Google and Microsoft are testing new software that will help people to save money by providing detailed information about their household energy usage.

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” – Lord Kelvin.

This is the slogan Google is using to promote its new gadget. With Google PowerMeter users will have access to real time information about their electricity usage straight on their iGoogle home page, which will then make it easier for users to understand and reduce energy consumption. Studies revealed that access to your household energy consumption can help you save up to 15% on your monthly bill.

But it’s the larger scale results that Google and also Microsoft are more interested in; for every 6 households that save 10% on electricity this will be the equivalent to taking a conventional car off the road.

Microsoft’s energy saving gadget is called Hohm and like Google’s is still in its beta version and at present are only available for US users, both gadgets are likely to be open to the general public towards the end of the year.

Every time Google makes an official announcement about an SEO technique, the effects on the SEO community can be compared to an earthquake or a tsunami and this time wasn’t different, since Matt Cutts announced that “PageRank Sculpting” could no longer be performed using the nofollow tag, site owners and SEOs have gone mad.

What is PageRank Sculpting?

First of all, the only way to pass PageRank is via links on a given page. Now imagine a page with £10 of PageRank to spend, this page has 10 outbound links, these links could be to other pages inside the same site or to other sites, that doesn’t matter, the point is each link will receive £1.

Let’s say we used the nofollow tag on 5 of those links, till now it was believed that the other 5 links would get £2  instead of £1 each which would help those five pages rank a bit better. So let’s say there is a login page within your or less important pages that you don’t want to rank well, before you could nofollow the links to those pages and direct PageRank to more important pages, that is how PageRank Sculpting worked.

The Death of PageRank Sculpting

“What happens when you have a page with ‘ten PageRank points’ and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are no followed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.”

The above is quote from Matt Cutts’ announcing the death of PageRank sculpting; well at least with the use of the nofollow tag. Basically what Matt is saying that, links with a nofollow tag still get no “PageRank money” at all and regular links continue to get £1 each.

What makes me laugh is the SEOs who have been quoting the benefits of their “PageRank Sculpting” over the past year, when Google changed the way PageRank flows over a year ago.

Conclusion

To sum things up on how Google assigns PageRank here is a quote from Danny Sullivan that explains the matter in a simple and easy to understand way:

“Google itself solely decides how much PageRank will flow to each and every link on a particular page. In general, the more links on a page, the less PageRank each link gets. Google might decide some links don’t deserve credit and give them no PageRank. The use of nofollow doesn’t ‘conserve’ PageRank for other links; it simply prevents those links from getting any PageRank that Google otherwise might have given them.”

Keyword research is the first, and in my opinion the most important task in the search engine optimisation process, this is why you need as much data as possible on each keyword you are planning in implementing on your site.

First thing you need to know about a keyword is its search volume, the higher the better, Google Keywords Tool is showing local search volume now which is very useful for geo-targeted sites. Once you have the search volume you need to compare against the competition on that given keyword, here is a simple rule of thumb, higher search volume against low competition.

Ok, now you have the search volume and the competition of your keywords, but what if you wanted to know more about it, like how many sites are using your keywords on their title tags? For that you will need a special command when you perform a search just type intitle:keywordname to refine it use intitle:”keywordname” that will give an exact match.

What about how many sites have my keywords in their URLS? To find that out use inurl:keywordname again to refine it inurl:”keywordname”.

Want to know how many sites have your keywords in the anchor text of links point back to them? Use inanchor:keywordname and to find out how many sites use your keywords in their description tags use intext:keywordname

Always remember to refine results to an exact match just quote the term, this also works for a normal search query.

All these commands are very useful to tell how much competition a certain keyword has and to determine how hard it will be to rank for them.