Dave Smith gave me the heads up that Google reshuffled the Page Rank deck for the second time this year. As I’ve said before, Page Rank Matters, even if it’s for purely superficial reasons.

Mary McKnight, of RSS Peices set off on a mission to improve the PR of several of her clients by starting PR5 Club:

“The club, which meets once a week for the 5 weeks following a PageRank Update focuses heavily on high level SEO strategies that WILL ensure that these bloggers hit a PR5 within the next two PageRank updates.”

With one reset down, they’re all in need of a strong finish. I don’t pretend to be an expert on improving PR, but I do like to watch.

Here are some observations concerning my blogs:

Blog Fiesta maintained it’s rank. I don’t even try to promote this blog. Frankly, I’m surprised it ranks as well as it does.

Brainious went from 0-2. I’m happy it made some progress, I’m just now getting around to focusing on this blog. Podcasts are coming in the next week!

Denver Modern is still a 4 & Lenderama is still a 5. They both made some progress though. Both sites are now displaying “Site Links” in limited circumstances. Dave is extremely jealous (see comments), so I guess that’s progress.

The Secret Diary of Greg Swann is still a 4. You might remember, Fake Greg Swann attained a PR4 in less than one month. That’s insanely fast. Much of the conjecture was that Google took a snapshot of FGS during all the commotion it stirred. Here’s the interesting thing though, the blog has been dead since the last reset. It’s still a 4.

So what does it all mean? I don’t know, but I’m happy to guess. I think Google’s trust in a domain name is more important for PR than all the little things that bloggers attempt in trying to boost it. I think lenderama, Blog Fiesta and Denver Modern are benefiting from the Google’s trust of mariah.com. Fake Gregg is getting the same traction from wordpress.com. I think there’s an opportunity here for new bloggers to jump start their PR. Here’s what I’d do if I was starting a real estate blog from scratch.

1. Start with a free WordPress.com blog. It think FGS has proven that Google trusts wordpress.com as a URL.

2. At the very same time, register your domain name for at least a few years.

3. Set up your domain name to forward to your WordPress blog. Go Daddy calls this Domain Forwarding. It’s like call forwarding. Now you can use the new domain name for your cards and stuff, but the blog’s true address is still yourblog.wordpress.com. For an example, try lenderama.com.

4. Blog your heart out. The great thing about this is that your total cost is just a few bucks for the domain name registration. Obviously, all the things you will want to do here are not covered in this post. Here’s a list to help you with that.

5. Once your PR hits 3 or 4, map your domain name to your blog. This is a guess on my part, but I think you’ll maintain your PR. I did something similar for Loan Bark before I sold it, and the PR was maintained. Domain Mapping only costs ten bucks a year.

6. After everything is all up and running, you could then consider leaving WordPress.com for more flexibility.

Will it work? I don’t know. Mary ensured her methods would work. So if your looking for guaranties, PR5 Club might be a better bet.

Wade published a great post on the SEO value of commenting on other blogs. His advice is spot on if your primary goal is improving your relevance in Google. I offer “Do Follow” links on my blogs for the express purpose of encouraging people like Wade to contribute to the conversation.

I’m a prolific commenter myself. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of comments I’ve left on other blogs in the last three years number well into the thousands. I’ve always taken the time to leave an appropriate link back, but it was never for the benefit of Google. I believe in the social value of commenting.

It’s so very hard as a blogger, to know if your ideas are resonating. Comments, any comments are welcome feedback. When I decided to post on other people’s blogs, it’s because I wanted them to know I was listening. I wanted to engage them in conversation. I wanted to forge a relationship with them.

During my stint as Fake Greg Swann, I wrote about how I love to argue. I try to keep that in check while commenting on other people’s blogs, but it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes, my strong opinions lead to a comment of mine being deleted for no other reason than the blog author disagrees with it. That’s unfortunate, because, like I said, the whole idea was to forge a relationship in the first place.

On the other hand, comments are a two way street. It’s ridiculous to me to solicit comments, and only  publish the ones who agree with your point. When one of my comments is deleted, I think, “who else is being silenced?” I also question if this is a blog worth commenting on. Who wants to spend the time to comment if nothing was ever to come from it? This happened to me today, on a pretty big RE.net blog. I doubt I’ll spend as much time there.

If anything can be taken from this, I would just say that comments are the 2.0 in Web 2.0. It’s important to treat comments like they are a face to face conversation. Don’t try get over on anyone, or BS them, or silence them, and you’ll be good to go.

“It’s all about the meta tags”. That was a favorite saying of one of the salesmen I sat next to, selling websites for Myers Internet. Keep in mind that this was eight years ago. Yahoo was the king search engine, and only nerds like me used Google. This catch phrase was part of his sales pitch as to how Myers was going to make this Loan Officer’s web site rank high in the search engines. I’m not sure if he knew what it meant, but meta tags were little bits of code to tell a search engine what a web site is all about.

Search Engines weren’t all that powerful at the time. For Yahoo to know the focus of your web site, you needed to give them these digital Cliff Notes to help them sort it out. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but competition to rank highly in these engines led web masters to manipulate “optimize” meta tags until their site ranked best, even if it wasn’t. By 1999-2000 search engines like Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Lycos were becoming less and less effective as more people learned how to game the system.

The first time I used Google was simply astounding. I actually emailed everyone I knew to tell them to try it. By comparison, Google was leap-years ahead of it’s competition. The secret to Google’s success is that they concentrated more on the content published than the site publishing it. They layered that with a trust system that gave pages additional clout based on how many other sources linked to it. All of the SEO wizards had two new challenges. One, was to get as many people as possible to link to their pages. But more importantly, the second challenge was to figure out how to manipulate content to deliver the best possible search results. Most of this is done in a very white hat manner, allowing Google to continue to reign supreme in the search engine wars.

But Keyword SEO is beginning to create the same diluted results that Meta Tags manipulation did at the turn of the century. The premise behind Keyword SEO is to write content that is rich in certain terms of value. For instance, if your blog about Brittany Spears, and you mention her in the title of every post, then three or more times in the content of the post, making the effort to type out her name each time instead of simply saying “she”, then presumably, Google will come along and see that you are mentioning her quite a bit, and rank you higher when somebody queries about her. For the most part, this actually works. If your key words are focused on something less competitive than “Brittany Spears” you might have a decent chance of showing up well in search results.

There’s a downside though. You may want to garner lots of traffic from a particular key word, but those visiting may have no use for your site. There’s still value in planting you virtual business card in front of as many eyes as possible, but the work it takes to own a keyword can sometimes not be worth the trouble. On top of that, writers who become to aggressive in stuffing keywords into their posts become harder to read. Still, key word SEO is an effective online strategy today.

But what about tomorrow? Folks, my reason for writing this post is that I’ve seen the future today. Just as Google toppled Yahoo, I’ve seen the technology that can do the same to the current champ. I was just invited to contribute to Powerset Labs. This is a beta site to help develop Powerset’s new Natural Language Search Engine. It’s not a finished product yet, but from what I can tell, Powerset will make key words no more relevant than meta tags. When a query is performed, Powerset looks at what’s being queried, then thinks of all the other ways a human might make the same query, then searches it’s data base. The key words that were entered into that little search box are now mixed in with a thesaurus of synonyms and related content. All the time spent by a webmaster writing the same key word over and over will have a largely diminished effect. In fact, it might even hurt. Now, if the competition who wrote about the same subject, using a bevy of synonyms to your keywords, they might actually rank better.

I can’t tell you that Powerset will replace Google. Who knows, maybe Google will buy them, or maybe they will come out with an even more effective algorithm of their own. However, what’s obvious to me is that SEO has once again grown to powerful, and a dithering of key word relevance is sure to come.