Internet Marketing Strategist | Keith Stojka

I finally decided to update Stojka.com, using (easy-to-use) WordPress this time around, so updates should come much more often. Family photos and updates are now in the Family tab, and I’ll be adding some info about Internet Marketing when I find the time. Enjoy!

Google Changes How It Handles Synonyms.

This seems like a potential game changer to me.  Google is really doing some major testing in the past several months, especially recently.  I’m seeing a few very different search results pages tonight (Firefox is showing a brand new look I haven’t seen before), and search results for a few keywords I tested earlier today are WAY off tonight.

Changing synonyms seems like just part of a larger frenzy of testing from Google to me…

Is the ride over for “nofollow” Page Rank Sculpting?

One of the keywords/sites I tested yesterday was using Page Rank Sculpting (using the simple rel=”nofollow” attribute on most links within the site’s pages, in an attempt to try to pass more “page rank juice” on to relevant internal links). A lot of internet marketers and SEO expert sites questioned if the “nofollow” page rank technique really worked – myself included – before a couple months ago when a colleague showed me what he was doing with one of his sites…

I can tell you from seeing his particular site in action, page rank sculpting sure seemed to work in Google, and work quite well.  His site was using page rank sculpting extensively, and had very few inbound links. The result yesterday? Same as the last few months… it was ranking on page 1, result #2 of Google for a competitive, single-word keyword among 104,000,000 results.

Tonight, I ran the same search result in Google…. that site dropped to page 7.  An interesting side note, that site didn’t register anywhere in the top 10 for Yahoo or Bing for that single keyword.  I think Google was the only search engine putting in a concerted effort to incorporate the “nofollow” tag in their algorithm – which actually exposed them more to the potential “gaming” of the tag.

Maybe this is just another Google blip in their recent testing, and my friend’s site will be back to page 1 tomorrow. OR… maybe Google just put an end to the SEO trick of “nofollow” Page Rank Sculpting for good.

A super-easy redirect script if you want a quick way to point an existing page to a new url.  It’s best to do a permanent 301 redirect for SEO purposes, but sometimes you just want to make a change… NOW!  This will do the trick.  You can always put the 301 redirect in place after the fact.

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You can use a simple PHP script to redirect a user from the page they entered to a different web page. One reason you may want to do this is that the page they are trying to access no longer exists. Using this method, they can be seamlessly transfered to the new page without having to click a link to continue.

• Users are redirected quickly and seamlessly
• When using the ‘Back’ button, the user is taken to the last viewed page, not the redirect page
• Works on all browsers

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: 1 Minute

Here’s How:

1. <?php
   header( ‘Location: http://www.yoursite.com/new_page.html‘ ) ;
   ?>
   Change the code on the redirect page to be simply this. You need to replace the URL above with the URL you wish to direct to.

PHP Redirect – Redirect Script – Redirect Web Page.

This is a great article I used to get up and running with WordPress.  The “How to Install WordPress” Youtube video is all you need.

WordPress – Why Google Loves WordPress.