SEO Book has a great provided a great summary of how web publication and monetization strategies have been shaped by the intended and unintended consequences of Google’s algorithm changes. While the timeline is a little confusing, the milestones are an excellent summary of how the web has evolved since 1999.

It is not clear if Google is deliberately picking the winners and losers as they react to the world they have wrought or why Richard Rosenblatt seems to come out the winner each time the relevancy team decides what is Truth and who suffers the consequences. As always, Aaron is thoughtful, provocative and one of the few visionaries who can see the opportunities provided by each iteration of Google “truth”.

Infographic by SEO Book

It has been almost two years to the day since I left Alchemist Media to focus on ItsTheROI, yet Google still ranks the Alchemist homepage #2 for my name, “Jonah Stein”. This is despite the fact that my name ONLY appears deep inside their site in a couple of comments on blog posts I wrote three years ago. It is also despite a lot of other post about Jonah Stein like SEO Book, a dozen or so speaking engagements with my bio on authoritative sites, Twitter and Facebook profiles and lots of other mentions in the press and the blogosphere.

As with any page that is only ranking based on back links, a quick glance at the cache confirms that the words are not on the page.

The challenging part of this type of mini bombing is how difficult is it to undo once you have generated any buzz at a company. I have contacted everyone I could find with my name linking to Alchemist Media and one exception, they have updated the links (Hi Matt) The 15 remaining links showing in OpenSiteExplorer.org with the anchor text of “Jonah Stein” still pointing to Alchemist Media are all obviously scraped copies of the SEOMoz Ranking Factors Version 2 that are not even in English. The only thing on these pages in English are the names of the SEOs who participated. The moral of this story is that even if you are a professional SEO, your name belongs to Google.

Update: Neither Yahoo or Bing rank Alchemist on page 1 or 2 for my name. On the other hand, neither of them have ItsTheROI in first place. Yahoo doesn’t even have me on page 1 or 2!

SEO’s frequently talk about PageRank (not Page Rank).  To prove we aren’t noobies, we quickly add that PR is not important anymore and to stop thinking of it as magical green pixie dust™.  While other external signals are just as important and ToolBar PageRank (TBPR) doesn’t represent the actual value Google puts on a page, there are some assumptions about PageRank that I think we can all agree on — at least until Google changes the rules on us.

1. Pagerank is still the most meaningful indexation metric
2. Higher PR is better than lower PR within a domain
3. PR0 is better than graybar
4. Graybar PR ~ supplemental index
5. If the URL you are viewing is not the canonical URL, the PageRank will not match.  You can see the canonical URL by viewing the Google Cache
6. If your page in not showing as cached in the index, it is not going to rank

If you are not familiar with what PageRank is or want to learn more about, read Danny Sullivan’s excellent, frequently updated and exhaustive (exhausting?) guide to PageRank, which he explains nicely:

Let’s start with what Google says. In a nutshell, it considers links to be like votes. In addition, it considers that some votes are more important than others. PageRank is Google’s system of counting link votes and determining which pages are most important based on them. These scores are then used along with many other things to determine if a page will rank well in a search.

™2005 Greg Boser, 3Dog Media

I discovered this morning that Google isseems to be cloaking results for some users based on either your browser ID user agent or possibly based on the extensions you are running in Firefox.

Like many search marketers, I frequently use Google custom queries.  By far, the most common query I use is the site: command which shows the pages from a particular domain or folder within a domain.   While preparing for SMX next week, I have been researching the effect of pagination and trying to demonstrate whether or not paginated pages are in the index. 

I am doing a case study for my clients, GreatSchools.org, examining their San Francisco Preschools ratings.  In order to see if any of the paginated pages are in the index, I search for “site:www.greatschools.org/ inurl:p=2”

When I run this search using Firefox, I get the following results:

When I repeat this query on Chrome, I see VERY different results.  So, it looks like Google is cloaking results for Firefox Users.

Update: 11:11 AM: The is some debate about whether changing content based on a browser user agent detection is really cloaking. I may be mixing my euphemisms, but I wouldn’t want to be making that distinction in a Google re-inclusion request. The impact of this is on regular users is slight virtually non-existent, but it looks like if this is not an isolated bug, professional SEO’s are going to have to start using Chrome on occasion (the good news is that Safari seems unaffected). If anyone wants to test this with a clean version of Firefox that doesn’t have any SEO extensions, let me know what you get. Maybe this is only because I have the SEOBook Toolbar and/or SEO For Firefox installed.

Update 2:01 PM: Commenters are reporting that some people confirm my results while others are seeing the same thing in FireFox and Chrome. This leads to an open debate about whether they are “personalizing” Site: results, showing different results based on IP/browse history, etc., or just screwing with me because I am a “known” SEO.

Updated 3/3/10: Confirmed that this is not a personalization issue with Byran Hordling, lead engineer on Google Personalization.

Update: 2/27/10, 1:30 PM. Michael VanDeMar pointed out that the pagination pages are being excluded by the Robots.txt. This explains the lack of metadata being shown, but does nothing to address why Chrome & Safari show different results from IE.